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#1709 Unlucky for some

(The saga of the Windows Fall Creators Update)
Started 21st January 2019

At some point I became aware that Windows 10 was repeatedly doing updates. It asked if it could reset the machine, and then it did it again another day, then one day I came back to the computer and found it had reset. This went on and on, but there are lots of Windows updates so it was nothing new. Eventually I caught it happening and noticed it ended by restoring the previous version of Windows.

Looking at the Upgrade Manager showed a number of instances of update 1709 supposedly awaiting a computer restart. Right away this is wrong, if the system knows an update has failed why allow yet another, without any attempt to warn the user the update is failing.

Investigating I found that I could opt out of this update for some months - I didn't want the update and there was a chance they'd sort the problem out.

At the start of 2019 the time ran out and Windows started doing the update again (and again...). Update manager told me off, in red, for poor computer management. Looking online there's some advice, but it is all of the form "try this", including try reinstalling Windows (try buying a new computer). Again this is fundamentally wrong, why no error messages, some clue as to what the problem might be.

I extracted the Windows update log file, all I could see were some obscure errors about end points. Well USB has end points, so I turned off USB 3 in the BIOS and update 1709 installed.

I have an ASUS P8Z77-V motherboard, only the basic version. I had seen a mention of USB as a potential cause of 1709 not installing. There are other causes described for this mobo on the web, like the optional WiFi card.

To get the Windows update log files use the command

Get-WindowsUpdateLog

The error message I got was

[endpointproviders]Failed to obtain 9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77 redir SecondaryServiceAuth URL, error = 0x80245002

Wait there's more
After a day or two, I got a number of blue screen events. Windows seemed to sort them out itself and the machine became stable. I turned USB 3 back on in the BIOS. But boot took a long time. Back to Windows event viewer which showed a critical error Kernel power 41 (63) for each boot. I got rid of that by turning off fast boot for a couple of power on/off cycles. This error had something to do with USB 3 because turning off USB 3 support in the BIOS and disabling the USB 3 driver made it go away.

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