Fixing Windows Update and IE9 starting issues in Windows Vista for good!

Windows Vista, we all hate it. But once in a while we are still facing it. Might it be because we fix a co-workers laptop that comes with it, or you have it because of the sake of using programs that do not run under Windows 7 or 8, or you just never bothered updating.

For a year now, I had faced the following two very disturbing issues:

1) IE 9 would open and close instantly rendering it unuseable.
2) Windows Update Service would not start anymore, despite being activated and not showing any errors.

Of course as usually, in such cases , all the helps on google do not help, neither the official or nor the custom made fix ie and fix windows update too.

An in-place upgrade installation of Windows Vista was not an option as Windows 8 is my primary OS so I didn’t want to spend a lot of time with fixing it, and didn’t feel like fiddling with BCD because of overwritten boot info due to the inplace upgrade.

So I have decided to try a forcing installation of SP2 and IE9, that wasn’t succcessful either.

Finally I found the solution:

As described here in TechNet in “1st option”: 


“Run the System File Checker (SFC) to repair Windows Vista system files
1. Click Start, type “cmd” (without the quote) in the Start Search bar, right-click cmd.exe and click run as administrator.
2. Input the following commands and press Enter after each line.
sfc /scannow
Note: There is a SPACE between “SFC” and “/Scannow”. This command will take several minutes to complete.
If the corrupted files are detected but cannot be fixed, we need Windows Vista Installation Disk to repair Windows.”




This fixes the IE 9 starting issue.

Then I did create a way of fixing Windows Update 
(this is coming straight from my head).

First we stop the update service by running the following in CMD as Admin:


net stop wuauserv



Then we delete the “Software Distribution” folder which can be found in your Windows Root folder.

then we restart the Windows Update service via CMD and same command as above except “start” this time.

If you run Windows Update now it will tell you that it has to install updates to be able to use Windows and then it will ask you to reboot Windows and run Windows Update again

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