Windows XP x64 Edition freezing on Microsoft Update

[dnyberg]

Hi guys and gals,

I've recently brought and built an new pc. On this new pc I installed Windows XP x64 Edition. Now for a couple of weeks this was going fine.

Now when I try to do Microsoft Update it goes through as normal up until the selection of either Express or Custom but no matter which on i click on, after searchin for updates I get an error message: 0x80072EFD.

I've tried everything i can find on the Internet including adding the web address to the trusted list, flushing the DNS records and so on.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Cheers

[Paul Adams]

This is most often 3rd party products blocking svchost.exe.
Do you have any firewall or "internet security" product installed?
(This could include a product which acts as a proxy server for IE, maybe to filter out ads.)

There is a useful set of tests here, too.

I would suspect the most likely causes to be:
- 3rd party firewall
- 3rd party "internet security" product
- application configured as a proxy server in IE
- incorrect/invalid proxy settings in IE
- some 3rd party product installed which modifies the behaviour of TCP/IP (remote access tool, filter driver, new NIC drivers, etc.)

It is possible your ISP has a transparent proxy and this is causing problems - do you have another machine which works okay?

To verify your proxy settings in IE:
- Tools / Internet Options
- Connections tab / "LAN Settings" button

[dnyberg]

The strange thing about it which i forgot to mention is that I have virtual machines running on that computer and they update fine. I do have NVIDIA firewall installed but i turned that off and still the same problem. I connect to the internet using a router but all other machines connected to it work fine.

[dnyberg]

Ok update.
I tried installing XP x64 on a virtual machine and it installed and updated fine! I then tried rebooting the virtual machine and it wouldn't reboot. It seems to me that there's major problems with this new version of XP. Has anyone else had the same problems? If so, how have you managed to sort them or have you just given up

[Paul Adams]

I have XP x64 Edition dual booting with 64-bit Vista on an Asus A8N-SLI Premium without a problem.

Before my recent rebuilt (originally dual-booted XP SP2 and XP x64 on C: and D: partitions respectively) I was running virtual 64-bit Vista and XP x64 machines on the XP x64 host too.
I didn't do extensive testing re: updates & Internet access on the guest machines as my testing was more along the line of debugging, but I don't recall any problems.

I have dealt with cases where VMWare installed on a host OS breaks or alters some networking behaviour due to the addition of virtual adapters, so I would start with a clean (non-slipstreamed, no extra apps, no "tweaks") install on the physical box and verify that Windows Updates work "out of the box".

What about Automatic Updates, do they work?
It's not straightforward to manually trigger an AU, but if it is enabled it would be interesting to see if it has the same issue.