Apparantly the root cause of the Windows Genuine Advantage Failure I mentioned in the last post was an issue where “Automatic Updates service cannot impersonate the logged-on user to finish downloading and installing the update.” Somehow my system was missing a needed Windows registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\SensLogn
After adding the subkey back with the appropriate registry entries Windows Update worked again and I was able to install the latest Windows XP SP3. I created the following registry file to import, based on KB 910341 :
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Notify\SensLogn]
“DLLName”=”WlNotify.dll”
“Lock”=”SensLockEvent”
“Logon”=”SensLogonEvent”
“Logoff”=”SensLogoffEvent”
“Safe”=dword:00000001
“MaxWait”=dword:00000258
“StartScreenSaver”=”SensStartScreenSaverEvent”
“StopScreenSaver”=”SensStopScreenSaverEvent”
“Startup”=”SensStartupEvent”
“Shutdown”=”SensShutdownEvent”
“StartShell”=”SensStartShellEvent”
“PostShell”=”SensPostShellEvent”
“Disconnect”=”SensDisconnectEvent”
“Reconnect”=”SensReconnectEvent”
“Unlock”=”SensUnlockEvent”
“Impersonate”=dword:00000001
“Asynchronous”=dword:00000001
