Win 7 Windows Update 80246002 Unable to run updates

I have had no changes to my WU agent.  Personally I think the DNS with the ISP is at fault here.

I will ask around and again ask for a definitive statement. 

And yes, Answer desk folks are third party, they are not officially Microsoft employees.

MarsRam:

You're the first one I've seen who mentioned receiving the message about updating the Update Agent.  I also run Norton Security Suite, which is supplied via my Comcast account.

Pretty much everything you've described - minus MS remotely accessing my PC and hosing it up - happened to both of my laptops and desktop.  Thankfully I found this forum and saw that others were experiencing the same error message, so I decided to hold off doing anything too drastic, for fear I would've ended up worse off than I was at the time!  I didn't do anything with the DNS that others had suggested in other posts.

What I can tell you is that all three of my machines are now able to check for updates with no error message.  I don't know what they did, but it is working now.

Good luck!

Somerset_692:

Incredible! I too have two other Windows 7 computers which I have not updated since I had the problem on my desktop. I ran windows update on my problem computer a while ago and it worked normally! So the problem is fixed, without having to do anything more. Great! I shall now run update on the other two.

To be fair, I did give permission to the Microsoft tech guy to access my computer. It required him to download and install a small application. So the fault is really mine. I should not have given permission in the first place. It cost me about 3 hours to correct what he did.

Cheers!

MarsRam

Its been 9 days since I posted the above, and have been following the conversation on this forum since.  Here is something I had not mentioned in my original post.  The morning following the fiasco, I had called the Microsoft Support Answer Desk to ask them to close my case.  The woman who answered tried to convince me that some work was still left to be completed on my computer, and that she needed to gain access to it.  There may be a virus causing the problem, she said . . . and so on and so forth.  I politely informed her to PLEASE close my file and that I had no further need for their help.  I now discover that the Support Answer Desk is not manned by Microsoft employees.  These are third-party people contracted by Microsoft.

Everything I've read here deals with "Band-Aid" fixes for the problem - not fixing the real cause, which was the WU Agent update.  I believe Microsoft has quietly resolved the problem and is not talking about it.  I started using Microsoft 20 years ago and this has seriously undermined my confidence in them.  There is a lesson to be learnt here.  All my Win7 computers are functioning perfectly normally since August 29.

MarsRam

What an unsuffiecient site.

No help at all (16pages)

Some advices change DNS others delete your SoftwareDistribution folder.

Totaly the mess of Microsft and Microsft itself has to fix it.

Thank you again for doing nothing (for MVP)

My issue resolved itself after a few days. Posting here never really helped me :/

also, thank you MVP boy for doing nothing to help us by instead trying to get us to download the fix it tool and talk about antivirus. Thanks for that.

Go in and delete the download folder from C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution

Then try Windows Updates again.