I was patching a Windows Server 2008 virtual machine, and noticed that one patch kept consistently failing. The failed patch was “Security Update for Windows Server 2008 KB967723” and it failed with error number 80070490 which I googled and was one of the many generic errors that can occur when using Windows Update. What should I do?
The first step was to open the logs located in c:\Windows\logs\cbs\cbs.log and validate what the error messages indicated. I opened the file in notepad and scrolled to the bottom, where the latest error messages indicated this patch was repeatedly failing (which I already knew). But, in any case, no other KB numbers were indicated, so I decided to download the patch manually directly from the Microsoft website.
Ironically, the IE10 browser would not allow me to download Microsoft patches. So, I installed and used Mozilla Firefox to download the patch. Once downloaded, I opened the Downloads directory and “Ran as Administrator” to install the patch. Then, I went back into Control Panel | Windows Update, to validate that checking for available patches no longer reporting KB967723 as missing. Voila! All is again well with this particular server.
Why does manually installing the patch work, while using the GUI tool fail? I have no good explanation for this weird behavior and assume it is a bug in the GUI installer.