WaasMedic Agent Exe stopping me from working

On 03/12/21, I fired up an MS Surface I only use in the field to off-load Pics from my digital camera for review on a screen lager than the camera's viewfinder or LCD panel.  It went into update mode, requested a restart to finish the updates, spent 2 hours with just the dark screen and circling white dots (not the usual "Windows update xx% complete..." on a blue screen.  Since it was clear the machine was hung (CTRL-ALT-DEL etc didn't work), I used the power button to shut down.  After a few minutes, powered back up, took several minutes from its SSD to get to a log-in screen and once running I checked WUD to find an error on the download.  Retry failed.  I downloaded the standalone patch installer from MS, it too will not install, so at that point I gave up, shut the  machine down and will see if when I use it again in a week or two if MS has gotten their act together yet and will be able to install that update correctly.

Offending package: "2021-03 Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 20H2 for x64-based Systems (KB5000802) (3) Failed to install on 3/12/2021 - 0x80070020".

As a side note if you look at notices posted to this KB's page ( ) you find this outright lie:

"2/24/21
IMPORTANT As part of the end of support for Adobe Flash, KB4577586is now available as an optional update from Windows Update (WU) and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Installing KB4577586 will remove Adobe Flash Player permanently from your Windows device. Once installed, you cannot uninstall KB4577586."

There has been nothing "optional" about this update on ANY of my Windows 10 machines.  All needed to use a Flash coded "HP Solution Center" app to control scanning on an HP AIO.  That app no longer functions and HP's solution is to use MS "Fax and Scan" app which give ZERO control that was available through the Flash app. (Ex. scan dpi, use OCR, scan to various file formats, B&W or Color, auto correct skew, preview with cropping, contrast higher / lower before saving etc.)

Just another example of Adobe and MS following the Apple"we know better than you, stupid user, what you want".

Similar issue to wmcole with flash. Normally open Update app to see if anything come through in morning & afternoon. 17th Feb am look showed been error in downloading updates. After a re-boot, opened app again, then in a blink it must have downloaded and installed something but no choice given. Only found out what it was when opened update history. This is one of the problems I have found when 'ERROR' occurs, opening WUD app again automatically downloads & installs - no choice given to delay to outside working hours etc - same when doing manual update if it finds anything. Never had these problems in the old old days when there were no regular updates being issued (showed my age there)

Paul:

Thank you for your reply. About 2 weeks ago I added a comment to an entry about waasmedic in Feedback Hub.

If I am able, the next time my computer experiences significant performance problems with waasmedic, I will try to capture recording with Feedback Hub. The big difficulty with doing this is when I have seen the problem, my computer (has HDD as system disk) takes a long time - minutes - to respond to any keyboard entries. After pressing CTRL-ALT-Del, it may take several minutes before Task Manager opens. Disk activity light is on solid, and once task manager opens up, disk activity is maxed out and stays maxed out, other resources (cpu, memory) are ok.

As I stated on another thread, when this problem occurs on my computer, it most often happens during the end-of-month Windows updates (around 4th Tuesday of the month) which get listed as failed updates in update history. I rarely see this problem (or update failures) for the 2nd Tuesday of the month Win updates. The times after the performance problem has occurred, my system has come up clean after scans (verifyonly type scans, not repairs) with sfc, dism, and chkdsk.

(I remember you providing the solution 3 years ago to recurring problem many users were seeing with Windows Updates - such as "Error 0x80070bc2 during installation KB4074588". Your fix helped lots of us get monthly windows updates to complete in those days. Thanks again.)

Tooney

Paul:

Assuming that it is very difficult when the waasmedic performance problem occurs to get responses to keyboard entry, is there some method to "start recording" activity process quickly, and attach the recording to feedback hub entry later, without having to first go through all the steps to run feedback hub app, make an entry, etc?

Tooney