Windows 10 Updater doesn't work (0x80080005) and Windows updater service won't start (0x80070002)

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I'm at my wits end with this issue... I heard the news of a big Win10 update hitting soon and I wanted to check if I had it already. To my surprise, my system last update was the 6th of October... odd. I'm using Windows 10 Pro x64.

When I try to search for updates, after a long while this is what I get: Error 0x80080005

Error 0x80080005! I've looked what that means and it's something related to Windows unable to access some files, but I don't know what files. The same happens when using the Windows Store, I can't install anything and I just realized that because I never use the Store.

Next I checked the status of the Windows Update service and it was stopped, when trying to start it from services.msc, I get the error "0x80070002 specified files couldn't be found". enter image description here

If I try to run net start wuauserv all I get is that the service couldn't start, System Error, System Error 2 and that the specified files couldn't be found. enter image description here

I also tried the solution given in this post with no success.

I don't know what else could I try, please help me. :(

windows-10
windows-update
services
asked on Super User Nov 21, 2015 by Deses

3 Answers

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To give closure to this old issue, what I did is get the latest Windows 10 ISO and install it on top of my current installation, and everything was back to normal.

It's really convenient as it really doesn't override much of my user configurations apart from reinstalling all the default Windows Store apps I manually removed.

I hope this helps somebody!

answered on Super User Jul 20, 2017 by Deses
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I had a similar problem. Delete C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and restart your PC. \SotwareDistribution\ is where your updates are stored, they often get corrupted for some reason.

If you can’t update properly after restart, try deleting the folder in safe mode. That’s the recommendation I’ve read in a tutorial on this.

The above process fixed the problem for me. I think it did it after the initial step and safe mode was not necessary, but frankly my Windows installations have so many problems all the time that I tend to forget them as soon as they go away, so I don’t remember it perfectly. Sorry for not being able to give you more details.

answered on Super User Nov 21, 2015 by David Schmid
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What seems to fix it for me is:

netsh winsock reset
answered on Super User Apr 28, 2016 by nilo • edited Apr 28, 2016 by Toby Speight

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