It turns out the problem lies with the Update Manager (UM). I found a blog post here that tells how to solve the problem. You basically must upgrade to the 3.0 version of the UM and then WU will work. Uhm, ya - but SP3 doesn't bother to do that for you. Really smart Microsoft ... I was about to reinstall without XP3 until i found this blog entry. Perhaps you should consider makes UM 3.0 part of your XP3 update process?

Here are the steps:

1. Manually download the UM 3.0. It is located here:
   http://download.windowsupdate.com/WindowsUpdate/redist/standalone/7.0.6000.381/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe
2. Open a command prompt and execute the following commands:

1. net stop wuauserv

2. "/[wherever you downloaded the file]/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe" /wuforce

   Don't forget to include the " marks if your download path has spaces.

3. net start wuauserv

That's it. You should now be upgraded to the latest version of the UM. In the comments to this post, someone said you don't need to bother typing the net stop and net start commands. *shrug*. I guess if you don't and it doesn't work you can always try it again with them.

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