Automatic updates box greyed out and unavailable

[Lance]

Hi

I installed Service Pack 4 on a user's Win 2000
workstation so that I could have Automatic Updates
available on it. When I open up Automatic Updates through
the Control Panel, a message says 'The Windows Update
Service is unavailable.' and all of the selections are
greyed out. Automatic Updates doesn't appear to be
functioning as no messages have appeared to inform the
user of downloaded updates since SP4 was installed and I
have had to download and install any updates via Windows
Update. I have installed SP4 on other Win 2000 boxes
around the office and have had no problems with setting up
Automatic Updates on these other workstations.

Is there anything that can be done to enable Automatic
Updates on this machine? Thanks in advance.

 

[Marty]

There might be either a local or group policy applied that
has the auto update settings configured. That will cause
the options to be grayed out. I have also seen it where
if that machine was ever on a domain that had such a
policy, and then removed, those settings stayed on the
local machine. I think there are some KBs out there that
tell how to hack the registry to reverse such settings.