Monthly rollup failing to install on some Windows 7 PCs

Sep 13, 2018 06:56 GMT  ·  By

While the experience with the September 2018 Patch Tuesday updates has been more or less flawless, it turns out there are users still hitting issues on Windows 7 and Windows 10.

As I reported to you yesterday, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update (version 1803) cumulative update installs without asking for a reboot, and this was just a bug requiring the update to install one more time.

And now according to a new report, the Windows 7 monthly rollup KB4457144 fails to install as well, with users getting error 0x8000FFFF.

At first glance, this error code doesn’t say much, but it seems the culprit is the lack of an old update that Microsoft released back in 2016.

How to fix the issue

The new monthly rollup requires a Servicing Stack Update that was published nearly two years ago, and without it, the update is possible. Somewhat surprising is that Windows Update can’t download the pre-requisites on its own, so you have to manually download and install update KB3177467.

The good thing is that installing this Servicing Stack Update does not require a reboot. Patching the system with this month’s rollup, however, does, but at least this time it’s supposed to install correctly.

The cited source indicates that the culprit for some of the problems experienced on Windows 10 April 2018 Update could also be a Servicing Stack Update, in this case, KB4456655. Manually downloading and installing this update before deploying the latest cumulative update could help fix any issues that may be encountered.

Microsoft’s September 2018 cumulative updates come without any known issues, which means they should install and run correctly on all systems. As you can see, this isn’t necessarily the case for everyone, but at least the percentage of computers struggling to install updates this month is substantially smaller than on the previous Patch Tuesday cycles.