I recently had to reinstall Windows XP as I let a stupid software (Advanced Registry Doctor and XP Smoker) do some unattended registry modifications. ARD fucked up my XP registry and removed some very vital keys for important services and XPS did something wierd as a result of which my whole system became slow and clumsy. And being the very nerd I am, I had turned off restore services as well as denied those softwares to create either restoration points or take registry backups. Anyways, I suggest you guys not to use those softwares and do all the modifications manually if you want to do some optimizations or anything. And if you are lazy, forget it, let everything run as it should and it won’t be a problem. Don’t mess around with softwares from other unknown developers.

Then I tried to repair the installation which ofcourse didn’t work. So I reinstalled XP over the existing installation and it totally fucked up the OS. Well, it didn’t work, I expected it but I didn’t want to loose all my data. So all I did was connect an external hard drive and back up my important data (movies, music, tools, etc.). It was very good of me to not put these stuff under any of the folders in Documents And Settings. Another advice to you all, don’t put data under that directory or under your profile, it easily gets messed up. By the way, when I reinstalled over the same installation, Windows XP deleted all my former rights and made those profiles and data under it inaccessible. So in reality I lost some files which I had downloaded just a day before. Not to say all the bookmarks that I had accumulated over the year.

Anyways, then I did a complete format, partitioned my drivers properly (20 GBs as XP main drive which will have only XP and Office, and 40 GBs for other regular stuff, downloads, etc.). And everything was working and suddenly, none of the udpates were getting installed. I searched Microsoft site without any good solution, googled a lot and still had issues. Got a couple of solutions but none worked.

One of them was to reinstall Windows Installer v2 which I tried to do, but it didn’t work and I always got the message that my system was updated and that I didn’t need to reinstall it (WTF…). The other solution was to stop Auto update service, rename/delete Software Distribution folder in C:\Windows and C:\Windows\System32 which didn’t work either. Last and not the least was to clean cookies, IE data, etc. and try again. None worked.

Finally, I jumped upon the solution by some very brilliant guy. Unfortunately I am not able to get the address again and thats why I decided to write it down myself here on this blog. He had correctly figured out the problem which was with the DLL registrations in the registry. I hope someday Microsoft stops using the stupid registry or makes it more secure and reliable.

Anyways, here is the fix. Hope this helps you all who has the problem and you just don’t have to reinstall XP to fix some registry errors. The solution works 100%.

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To fix the .dll issue, you will need to re-register a couple of .dll files. To do this, follow these easy steps:

Run the command prompt by clicking on the Start Menu and selecting Run. Type "cmd" and hit Enter.

In the new window that came up, type each of the following commands, hitting enter after each one:

REGSVR32 WUAPI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG1.DLL
REGSVR32 ATL.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS2.DLL
REGSVR32 WUCLTUI.DLL
REGSVR32 WUPS.DLL
REGSVR32 WUWEB.DLL
REGSVR32 WUAUENG.DLL

Windows update should now behave normally.

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