This weekend I decided to put XP on my laptop for a day to see how it ran. I hated it. Yeah it was fast. But it just seems… old..

Anyways, Vista is back on now (I still might go back to Win2k8). But.. while I had XP installed for 4 hours, I tried to do Windows Update and it kept failing and failing. I went and found the WindowsUpdate log file, and at the bottom,

AUClnt FATAL: Error: 0×80004002. wuauclt handler: failed to spawn COM server
Handler FATAL: 0×80004002: ERROR: Remote update handler container process created (PID: 2912), but exited before signaling event
Agent * WARNING: Exit code = 0×80004002

Well, after some digging, found you need to re-register the Windows Update dll’s (you can put these cmd’s in a batch file and run it)

regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuapi.dll

I also restarted the Automatic Updates service. Tried it again, and it worked. Weird, but it works :)