Installing…stuck at 0%

[notnAP]

Since upgrading some systems in the plant to (fully patched) Win 11, we’ve been seeing behavior on some (but not systems). Some updates, especially the larger ones, will show as Installing, but will stay stuck at 0% indefinitely. i.e., 0% Installing… (1/1)

While it seems to happen more often on win 11 systems that were upgraded from win 10, it also seems to happen on raw win 11 installations as well.

I’ve found this has happened on KB5033375 especially (a 600MB+ update) as well as KBKB4023057 (Windows Security update)

Further, if the local user checks for updates manually, windows will report not finding any that need to be applied – “you’re up to date.” Meanwhile, BatchPatch keeps reporting the update is stuck at 0%… checking again returns Error 1623. HRESULT -2147024891, which indicates there is already an update underway. The orphaned process can be reattached, and we’re back to 0% and stuck.

What’s more, rebooting Windows is the only recourse… and if you reboot I usually see an update tries to start downloading/installing.
If I allow Windows Update to continue the attempt, or if I manually trigger the update, the same results happens – it will show stuck in batchpatch. It will sometimes also show which update is stuck. I’ve found success downloading the update installer, and applying these updates manually (when I can catch it before WSUS jumps in and takes over).

When this happens, I also sometimes see a problem where installers will fail, as they cannot access the Windows Installer Service.

I suspect this is more of a Windows issue, but I’m hoping for an answer.

[doug]

Indeed it sounds like an issue with Windows, confirmed by the fact that you experience it with manual Windows Update directly on the machine even when not using BP. When you say that it hangs indefinitely, my first question is how long have you actually waited? We have not ever seen nor heard of Windows (or BP) not *eventually* completing. If I were in your shoes I would let it sit for up to ~48 hours before deciding that it’s not going to proceed any further. Back in the Windows 7/2008 days there were some situations where Windows could take that long to complete. While the particular issue that occurred back on those systems is not something that we have ever seen occur on more modern versions of Windows, I would still use that timeline of up to ~48 hours as a guideline for how long I’d wait in your current predicament before feeling confident that it truly will hang indefinitely. I would also check to make sure that disk space on the system isn’t low. And one other thing that I’d be curious about is approximately how old is the hardware where this is occurring, and is the CPU pegged at or near 100% during execution?

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