Recently at a site we had machines starting using high CPU of the SVCHost process, this process is used by lots of services to access the network , however, as soon as stopping the Windows Update Service CPU came back down to normal

I had seen this before at another site and the issue was due to not enough CPU ( only one was flatlining the CPU )  , however increasing the CPU and memory still did not fix this

Then after some recent updates, the servers would no Windows Update anymore , they would just sit on “Checking for Windows Updates”. I couldn’t install updates Via powershell 

A server running Windows Server 2012 R2 on the same network updated fine!

I tried the normal fix of Wiping these : 

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate

However to no avail.

 

I checked the Windows Update Log : C:\Windows\WindowsUpdate.log

2019-04-23 14:09:51:839 5080 ab8 CltUI FATAL: CNetworkCostChangeHandler::RegisterForCostChangeNotifications: CoCreateInstance failed with error 80004002
2019-04-23 14:09:51:839 5080 ab8 CltUI WARNING: RegisterNetworkCostChangeNotification: Error 80004002

 

I then found an article to Remove the Desktop Experience Feature ( which had been installed to Disk Cleanup the servers ) 

After this I did this again and could windows update again

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate

Tags: Checking for Updates, Error 80004002, HighCPU, RegisterNetworkCostChangeNotification, Server 2012, SVCHost, update, windows, Windows Update, Windowsupdate.log

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