Security patches fail to install

[Eugene]

I have just tried to install the latest security patches.
Windows Update for some reason keeps saying that the
patches have not been installed correctly (it does not
even try to download them). So I have downloaded the
patches directly from the security bulletin.

Now when I click on them (from the administrator account)
an error pops up: "Unable to find a volume for file
extraction. Please verify that you have proper
permissions." My drive has only one NTFS volume with
plenty of free space. Any ideas?

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Make sure that you are indeed logged on as an administrator by verifying with " net
user username " and " net localgroup administrators ". It is possible that your
permissions have been restricted, though an administrator always can change them
back. Look at the root/drive folder, program files folder, and \winnt folder to make
sure administrators group and system have full control. You can check that in folder
properties/security. If problems still persist see the link below for how to reset
security settings back to default defined levels. --- Steve

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;313222

 

[Eugene]

Thanks, Steve!

That actually resolved the issue!

I noticed that Administrators had full access to all files
and folder in C:\, but not to C:\ itself for some reason.
Thus, they could not create a new folder in the root
directory. That could be the source of the problem.

So I reset the security permissions for the entire drive
and also enabled auditing of all and everyone's access
failures for files and HKLM. There seems to be a small
performance hit because of that, but I just want to make
sure that everything is working smoothly now.

Eugene