At the risk of creating thread drift, I've had the following WU issue on 2 Win10 Pro x32 systems at my company and my personal Win10 Pro x32 system at home:
All 3 systems survived the BSOD problem, but when 2 of them automatically downloaded the 02-18 Cumulative update and restarted to install, the boot process became stuck in a loop, rebooting after about 30 seconds of disk activity (10 seconds with the Win
logo, 10 seconds with a black screen, 10 seconds with just the animated circle). No BSOD, no Inaccessible Boot Disk.
After the second boot failure, the system goes into Recovery Environment without attempting an Automatic Repair. If you restart at this point, you'll get a repeat of the boot loop. If you continue into Troubleshooting mode, RE will ask for your username
and password (if any; leave blank if none), followed by the usual RE menus.
In this particular case, DISM is completely unneccessary; System Restore works perfectly and consistently (if enabled) using the restore point created just before the latest Windows Update. But you should disconnect your internet connection to prevent the
02-18 CU from beginning again before you have the chance to pause (turn on) WU for 1 month.
A fourth, seldom used system crashed with a BSOD after working well for the last 4 weeks. Apparently an earlier 01-18 CU was queued up and waiting for Norton Security to update itself to a version that was compatible with the CU. Upon the mandatory restart
once the Live Update was complete, the system crashed on boot with an Inaccessible Boot Device. And I made the mistake after removing the latest rollup patches of not immediately doing an inplace upgrade when the system rebooted, and so far that machine is
still down. (I plan to try a dism /clean-up ... to get it working.) On this system I was able to pause WU before I rebooted, but apparently pausing WU on a Pro system doesn't affect any downloads that may be waiting to install.
A fifth sytem has also downloaded the 02-18 update, but when I shutdown and update or restart and update, nothing gets updated or installed. After the reboot or restart, WU still shows the 02-18 CU update waiting for a restart. I suspect that it, too is
waiting for a newer version of Norton Security to be installed.
These are all older Intel motherboard-based systems (DG30 & 40 series). My home system was only recently upgraded to the Fall Creators update in early January. I may have installed the AMD patch issued in mid-January (referred to much earlier upthread) to
resolve the BSOD issue on a couple of these systems.
So it appears that MS has graced us with a slightly less lethal problem this month. The reboot loop problem has occurred before (back in November on server systems, IIRC) and may be able to be properly fixed with a registry key change, but for now I'll just
wait on an official KB from MS to deal with this issue.
If you haven't already enabled System Restore on all your systems, please do so. The downside is very small time-wise. It's disabled by default on clean installs of Windows 10, and may retain the setting from an upgrade from Win 7 & 8.x. Be sure to allocate
at least 20GB to accomodate sufficient restore points. A restore point is automatically created before every major WU system patch and every program (non-store app) install/remove, so you risk losing a known good restore point if there's a lot of this sort
of activity on your system.
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