WSUS: solving event 10032 and event 13042

So todaywas another day of strange WSUS errors. Somehow since a few days my eventlog was full of 2 critical errors:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows Server Update Services
Event Category: Clients
Event ID: 13042
Date:  16-1-2009
Time:  22:52:57
User:  N/A
Computer: WSUS server
Description:
Self-update is not working.

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Event Type: Error
Event Source: Windows Server Update Services
Event Category: Core
Event ID: 10032
Date:  16-1-2009
Time:  22:52:57
User:  N/A
Computer: WSUS server
Description:
The server is failing to download some updates.

As far as I know, I hadn’t changed anything on my WSUS server (which is WSUS 3.0 SP1 btw). I’ve tried to find a cause in the eventviewer for these sudden errors, but no event even came close to a possible cause.

Googling resulted in possible solutions like:

1. Start the Update Services as an domain admin account (instead of the usual Network Service)
2. Allow anonymouse acces on the Default Website in IIS (or the WSUS website, in case you chose for a custom install on port 8530)
3. Re-install WSUS

I tried option 1 and 2, but without positive results. It only got worse. Oh well, I really didn’t want to do option 3 because of the settings I might lose. But then there’s always the decision to be made: learn of save time. Let me tell yo one thing: when you’re working on a friday night, it’s best to choose the easy solution. So what I did:

1. I made a backup of my WSUS database (stop the Update Services, WSUSCertServer, Windows Internal Database (MICROSOFT##SSEE)) by copying the complete WSUS folder to another harddisk.
2. Ran the WSUS 3.0 SP1 install file. When asked what to remove, I did not select any (database files, log files etc.).
3. After the uninstall was completed, I reinstalled WSUS. All settings were still there. The reinstallation took me 20 minutes in total.