Windows update never stops checking for updates

aoetalks said:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3102810 should speed things up. After installing this it took only a few minutes to scan for updates on a fresh Win7 SP1 install.

After a fresh install of Win7 SP1 my updates stopped working, it would scanned for days never finding updates. Your Fix worked for me, updates were found with in a few minutes, all working ok ever since.

Thank you

KB3172605 was my fix!

I had the following already installed:

KB3020369
KB3138612

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Yep KB3172605 is finally so far a good thing to have around :)

That KB was removed from thousands of computers were I work. The only info that we were given was:
The KB is causing problems for some users. If I learn more, I'll post more.

One of the non-profit organizations that I support had a laptop that was taking a long time to update. I left it searching updates for 48 hours and still no list. The last updates were installed in June - which was the last time that the laptop had been turned on. As an experiment, I opted not to manually install that KB. After a total of 4 days of searching, a list of OS and OFFICE updates came thru. 41 updates in all.

There were no CPU or RAM problems while the laptop searched for the updates. If I had not been curious, I would not have noticed the long WU search time.

aoetalks said:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3102810 should speed things up. After installing this it took only a few minutes to scan for updates on a fresh Win7 SP1 install.

Add me to the list of people who joined this forum to say Thank You for this fix! I just bought a refurbished laptop and I've had nothing but problems with Windows Update. Thanks to that comment and others in this thread I think that it's ALMOST ready to use, but it was beyond ridiculous that it was so difficult. Installing SP1 by itself, one of the other updates needing to be done while not connected to the internet, and then after SP1 was successful there were 244 Important updates to download and install...and with only 2 GB of RAM my laptop froze up at update 159. I did a hard re-start and it seemed to pick up where it left off, but it's still searching for and finding updates, and when I turn it off it needs to configure the computer half of the time. With so many Important updates after SP1 it's obvious that Microsoft needs to do a SP2 for Windows 7, but it's just as obvious that they're not going to do that. But anyone who buys a new or refurbished computer with 7 on it has a LOT of hoops to jump through in order to get it working properly, so thank you to everyone here for making it possible for me to solve all of these issues.

I have two Win7 VMs that hadn't been booted in over a year. Windows Updates wouldn't complete even after running for several days. At that point I went looking and found this thread.

On the first VM, I installed the KBs in this order: 3172605, 3102810, 3112343, and 3138612. Each time, I would apply the update, reboot, and recheck Windows Updates. The problem was solved only after the last update (3138612) was installed. The sister VM was very similar, and so I decided to apply 3138612 first, and this did the trick on that server.

Thanks to all who've contributed to this thread!

ThrashZone said:

You're listing multiple update clients in reverse order they were released
All that is needed is KB3020369 & KB3172605 in that order :)

I didn't think to look at the order these were released in. I read a bunch of different sites, including this thread, and tested to see what worked (based on my understanding of what I had read).

I did neglect to mention KB3020369, which I had installed just prior to KB3172605. (There were multiple other things I had done in my attempt to fix the problem, and I didn't include them all in my post. Which is how I failed to mention KB3020369.)

So in my case, these two were not sufficient to solve the problem. And on the second VM, I installed only KB3138612. It seems (based on other reports in this same thread) that there is not a single, one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. Hence my post.

I do have a copy of both of these VMs from before I tried to apply any of the fixes. If you are certain of what you are posting, I will make time and run some additional tests.