Posted August 9, 200816 yr This is for anyone using XP SP3 who's seen Updates switched off and cannot turn the service back on - probably as a result of trojans Vundo and/or Conhook. I was able to isolate things relatively easily because the machine affected was a brand-new Tosh laptop with a Vista->XP recovery installation. I started to get a bunch of ad pop-ups after Day 1. Thinking I should look for an MS security fix first, I tried doing an update and saw that it was switched off. I couldn't re-start it and enabling & restarting AU/BITS in Services did nothing either. My heart sank at the thought of registry-heavy stuff. I did this and it worked: 1. Install Windows Defender http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=435BFCE7-DA2B-4A6A-AFA4-F7F14E605A0D&displaylang=en&mg_id=10134 2. After installation, Defender would not update for the same reason as the Windows updates. You do need the latest Defender updates. Therefore, I manually updated using the link provided http://www.microsoft.com/security/portal/ADL.aspx and ran the 32-bit version which applied to me (the 64-bit version is there as well). 3. I then let Defender scan and it found the aforementioned trojans. I let the program remove them (four in all). After restarting, the trojans, add-ons and pop-ups disappeared and Automatic Updates were restored. I was genuinely surprised as I had only installed Defender as a bit of extra security in the first instance of what I thought would be a long-haul process. I accept that this isn't a particularly techie solution (well, on the surface anyway) and also relies on Windows Defender - but it worked for my particular situation and it is free. Even if it doesn't cure everyone's Update issues referred to in this discussion/thread, I don't think it'll do any harm. Hope this is of some help.
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