attention: solution to winupdate simple connection problems

in short: it's most likely your firewall not allowing svchost.exe to connect
to windows update, so check firewall settings for svchost.exe.
check your firewall traffic log, you can easily see if outbound traffic to
windows update is blocked for svchost.exe or not.
note: just exiting firewalls or allowing all trafic don't work most of the
time svchost.exe somehow gets stuck.

THIS HAPPENS FOR THE FOLLOWING REASON:
you run your firewall everyday, first time you see a message:
"svchost.exe is trying to connect to ....blah blah" you think it's some
trojan
and you hit "do not allow, permantly" but as a matter of fact it's windows
update
doing it's job in the background thru svchost.exe. so you inadvertantly
disable
svchost.exe outbound connections for all programs... including windows update.
next time you notice that windows update is not working anymore... you freak
out and start searching for solutions... "you try allow all trafic" on
firewall but that sometimes does not work and you rule out firewall searching
for something else...

the solution is this:
- need to do "custom program allow" in your firewall to allow for outbound
traffic to windows update site with svchost.exe, follow your firewall
instructions on how it can be done. this is the safe solution as other
programs will not be allowed to use svchost.exe including trojans. some
threads here show how it is done for norton firewall
- or mark svchost as "ask" and when windows will try to connect, check where
it's connecting and allow to connect to windows update...

***for sygate users: open traffic log while windows is connecting to update
site,
if outbound is blocked, you got svchost.exe blocked, uncheck "hide windows
services" from front panel and under svchost.exe switch to "ask"
run windows update again and it will work...

that will solve most of simple connections problems.

for problems other than connections it helps to look into windowsupdate.log
file
this contains pretty much all the error code and connection attempts as well
as
file operations, in the worst case senario, delete contents of the file,
save, start windows update, let it sit there for 5 minutes it will dump all
problems into that file , then take windowsupdate.log file and send it to
microsoft e-mail support
let them do the job they are supposed to do...