Never gonna use automatic update feature again

Sun, Oct 5, 2008

I forgot to disable the automatic update in Vista SP1 and got myself a pretty messy issue.

Last night Vista downloaded one “security update” . This morning i plugged in my Orange Expresscard and got the cute error when Business Anywhere app started : “This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way”. First I supposed it was from the .net update included with Visual Studio 2008 bunch of updates it performed. Wrong!

After a couple of hours I managed to track the error which seemed to be caused by a fairly new service called Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol Service

Worst thing was that the service Remote Access Connection Manager , required to perform data devices detection and proper opperation was depending on it and , even though it was new and unstable as a service , Microsucks thought it was a good idea to deliver this via a non-reversable update.

The cute part is that although the event log showed all the updates were successfully installed , Procmon revealed otherwise. The SSTPsvc lacked several security policy registry entries and one library required for proper interaction with RAS-based devices.

After spending good minutes trying to fix the registry entries and cooking the hex-version of the security policy needed (offline mode- which only allowed me to “work by example” ) it seems the service still failed to start due to the lack of the library needed to work with my network adapter which supposedly had to be found in \Program Files\OrangeBS\BEWInternetRO\Connectivity\corecom

Since I was missing both brilliant ideas and an internet connection I decided to work a KISS (keep it simple , stupid) scheme , so I managed to find a workaround by deleting the dependency keys from

[HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\RasMan\DependOnService\]

The main surprise was when I came back online after a reboot . It seems that there have been lots of people complaining about this , but no official sollution emerged yet , not even on the M$ forums.

So , to all the people ot there , I suggest this workaround and .. do as I do , only rely on service packs and forget about daily (nightly) Windows updates .. beacause they seem to suck!

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