BITS service is missing, how can I get it back?

Hi Xircal,

The December Patch Tuesday has me plumbing depths of Windows XP I never want to see again.  While exploring the posts in the community, I've found your advice extremely helpful and have managed to get the BITS running again on my venerable Dell XP desktop followed by a successful update of all the security patches.  I've had less success with an installation of XP that I run on a Mac in a VMWare virtual machine.  Until Tuesday, it had run for a couple of years without any problems.  Now, however, BITS is balking.

At first, it didn't exist on the services list,  Employing ElderL's registry fix, I've been able to add BITS to the services list. When I try to start the service, I get an alert stating "Could not start BITS service on Local Computer.  Error 1290: 0x50a." Thinking I need to follow your script to register the service, I started by checking to see that the qmgr.dll file is in the three locations you've listed.  It's not.  Search finds the file only in C:\WINDOWS\system32.  In fact, the folders C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 and C:\WINDOWS\system32\bits don't exist in my WINDOWS folder.  So I'm stopped when I hit your proviso, "Provided they're all present."  System Properties confirms that I have SP3 installed in a 2002 version of Microsoft Windows XP Professional.

Can you advise me how to proceed?  Thanks in advance.

Thank you for the link ElderL I actually found some help there :)

I was pointed to a Link

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/misc-registry-fixes-for-windows-7-xp-vista/

and it pointed me down to #14 in the list which I did download and run

I did manually go back to the services from the administrative tools and right click to open the properties for BITS and click the start

I have now returned to my Windows Updater and it was able to start and is currently Downloading the updates :)  feeling very optomisic  ATM