BITS, SUS, and Windows Update...



We had recently been battling an issue with a laptop; whereas a user was not able to pull updates form SUS or Windows Updates. We had run through a listing of normal troubleshooting steps and were not able to resolve the issue. We finally got to the heart of the issue. The BITS queue was clogged with errored out or suspended transfers.



Windows Update, SUS, and SMS 2003 use BITS. Also a number of third party applications are starting to use BITS as well. (What is BITS? Background Intelligent Transfer Service) BITS has an Admin tool which is part of the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools.



Full information and instructions can be found at

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/bits/bits/bitsadmin_tool.asp



In the case of this machine, the command syntax needed was,



BITSADMIN /LIST /ALLUSERS



12-14 bad transfers in the queue.



BITSADMIN /RESET /ALLUSERS



Once the queue was cleared, Windows Update was able to download and install updates normally.