Fix for Vista Automatic Updates to Ship Via Automatic Updates

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

August 29, 2007, 3:55 PM

A curious problem cropped up last month: Windows Vista users reported that the program that manages their Windows services (SVCHOST) would crash after having downloaded and installed a batch of updates.

Microsoft recently issued a manual fix for this problem, though users who don't want to have to learn the equivalent of heart surgery should soon be able to download a patch for the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS)...assuming it works.

"I'm running Vista Ultimate 32-bit," related one user to one of Microsoft's support forums last month, "and every time I enable the BITS service, it crashes svchost.exe and causes Windows Aero to go all funky (looks like Windows Classic style in some aspects)."

While support personnel were able to provide this user with a working solution, Microsoft soon afterward published another set of manual fixes to the BITS problem. But what was highly unusual about that fix was that, in order for it to work, the symptoms of that problem (SVCHOST crashing) should not have manifest themselves yet.

"The update that is described in this article prevents the symptoms that are described in this article," Microsoft's KnowledgeBase article begins. "However, you cannot use this update to recover from symptoms that you are experiencing."

Today, Windows Enterprise Networking Team developer Michael Platts blogged that his company has produced an automatic fix, that contains "an update for BITS [that] will prevent the above problem from happening."

The way Platts phrases this also suggests that the SVCHOST crash should not have manifest itself first, however, before trying to download the fix...perhaps using the very service that causes the symptoms to appear.

For Vista systems where the symptoms do crop up, the solution may be simple, if you don't mind using the command line: They involve restarting the BITSADMIN service manually, using the instructions supplied on Microsoft's support forums (linked earlier), and rebooting the computer to ensure the service is still running on Automatic.

The fix will come on the heels of a Daylight Savings Time update that appeared just today, which promises to adjust its automatic DST geography for certain places in the world (several Indiana counties being among them) that have recently flip-flopped over what time zone they've decided to be in.