Tim Mintner

If you have machines that are not part of the domain or you do not want to wait until a reboot to turn off the Automatic Updates feature, you can set the registry entries manually through an SMS Package by doing the following:

Copy the following information into a file called disableautoupdates.reg

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"NoAutoUpdate"=dword:00000001

Create a SMS Package that includes the file disableautoupdates.reg with the following command line:

regedit /s disableautoupdates.reg

This process wil also work if you have Workgroup machines that cannot receive this registry setting through Group Policy.

Now that you have enabled the Automatic Updates service, you might be concerned that your clients will start to automatically download and install Windows Updates.  To prevent this from happening you need to set the following Group Policy setting:

Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Update, Configure Automatic Updates = Disabled.

Setting the Configure Automatic Updates will disable automatic downloads and still allow you to download the updates from the Microsoft Updates web site.

If you watched the ITMU webcast on Friday, you noticed that you have to enable the automatic updates servcie for the new ITMU scan engine to work properly.  If you have disabled the Automatic Updates service on your machines, you will need to re-enable this service.

This little VBscript will start the Automatic Updates service and set it to start Automatically.  You can either run this remotely or push this out with SMS to all of your clients:

On Error Resume Next

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:" _
& "{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colServiceList = objWMIService.ExecQuery _
("Select * from Win32_Service where Name='wuauserv'")
For each objService in colServiceList
call objService.Change( , , , , "Automatic")
objService.StartService()
Next

Unless your application packagers are really really careful, chances are that they will overwrite DLL registration settings in the registry that could break certain features of IE or Windows Scripting Host (WSH).  When this happens use a batch file with the following command and send it out to your PCs.  This fixes about 90% of the errors associated with bad DLL references.  You can set this up as a recurring task or just make it non-mandatory and have your users run it if they are experiencing problems.

regsvr32 /s oleaut32.dll
regsvr32 /s shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 /s actxprxy.dll
regsvr32 /s mshtml.dll 
regsvr32 /s vbscript.dll

regsvr32 /s Urlmon.dll
regsvr32 /s Shell32.dll

regsvr32 /s Msjava.dll
regsvr32 /s Browseui.dll

regsvr32 /s Scrrun.dll
regsvr32 /s Jscript.dll

regsvr32 /s activeds.dll