Update: Windows Update update breaks updates

Last month's stealth updates to Windows Update caused a commotion within the community, with many arguing that the Microsoft should not update the updater if automatic updates were turned off while others argued that it seemed logical that the updater updated itself when the feature wasn't completely disabled by being told to not even check for updates.

Those arguing against the self updating Windows Update found a solid grip on their side of the argument when a select group of users found it impossible to install updates after using the "Restore from CD" function in Windows XP.

The problem that users ran into happens when users used the repair feature on genuine XP CD-ROMs. Generally, this is only done when Windows XP becomes unbootable for some reason or another.

Using the repair function on the CD will roll back drivers, patches, and Internet Explorer to the shipping variations found on the CD and should fix any problems that had occurred. Normally, the feature works flawlessly but in these particular cases, it created problems on its own.

After doing the restore and downloading updates from Windows Update, some of the executables do not get registered with Windows. This prevents updates from installing even if you had downloaded the updates. The Microsoft Update Product Team blog acknowledged the problem and began working hard to isolate the problems and offer up a fix.

Within a day of the problems being reported, Microsoft responded with a Knowledge Base update. The KB article explains how to register the files with Windows that are failing to be registered automatically. Following the steps should take no more then a minute or two but you can expect an update to Windows Update to correct the update breaking issues sometime in the near future.

Were you one of the few affected by the update breaking update to Windows Update? Let us know if you ran into any problems by telling us over in the forums.