Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

Is the .poo extension mandatory or will any extension work?

;)

Ok, how about another. I conform to the automatic update and let it do its thing. It says, "you can continue to use your computer while the updates are installed". Quite nice, I keep working along with Microsoft doing their thing side-by-side. After the dust settles it says I have to restart. I select close, I'll restart later because I'm in the middle of WORKING FOR A LIVING.

Now every couple of minutes it keeps bugging me to restart my system. Selecting restart later only resets their timer. It shows over and over again. If I'm unlucky enough to get called away for some time, it will shut down everything I'm working on and REBOOT FOR ME.

I think they need quite a bit more work in this area.

John, that happened to me once while I was giving a very important presentation to some senior VPs. How embarassing it was (to say the least)! Damn reboot kept popping up on me, people would chuckle, again and again. I finally had to give into the darkside and let it reboot while I stood there.

thanks got new lap op and got this error when trying to install updates. This fix worked excellent

You are superman, Scott!! It works! And I really like your idea about the extension .poo because this problem annoyed me for a whole week.
Thanks a lot!

Another thing, has nothing to do with windows update. I wonder if Chinese character 善, in the name of your site, should be 禅. Because 禅 means MEDITATION while 善 is GOODNESS.
;)

When getting this:
> "Installation Failure
> Error Code: 0x80070057
> Try to install the update again, or request help from one of the
> following resources."

OK. Here's the easy solution I found
when Windows Update/XP tries to download update files BUT does not install them (claiming that "you already have downloaded those files"):

I applied your ".poo" extension solution to the folder "Downloads" (instead of "DataStore.poo").

So:
c:\WINDOXP\SoftwareDistribution\Download
became:
c:\WINDOXP\SoftwareDistribution\Download.poo

Sure enough, WinUpdate re-created the "Download"
folder, populated it with my selected d/l Update files and then installed them normally.

Hooray! Of course, all that should not be necessary if MS tested their updates before releasing...

Thanks Scott!

Ray
San Francisco

Thanks Scott,

Thanks for taking the time to document this issue.

Jeff

Thanks for help. I had the same problem.

Hi Scott
Tried the suggestion of renaming the folder but it did not make any difference. Still get the same error.
But thanks