WSUS update error 80072EE2 solved (at last)

I have a WSUS server set up on my network (with several physical and virtual machines it saves a lot of bandwidth!), but on some systems I was unable to update and constantly had the error code 80072EE2.

If you search on the web you find other people with similar errors. I’d tried various solutions but none worked. Then today I found this useful WSUS client check script. Running this script allows you to check the WSUS-related settings on any machine (even remotely, which is cool and saves a lot of time!).

As soon as I ran this I found the cause of the problem: I had previously used WSUS (about two years ago!) on a different server, and some of the clients had the old server name set as the WSUS server in the registry folder HKLM/SOFTWARE/Policies/Microsoft/Windows/WindowsUpdate – the values for WUServer and WUStatusServer were set to the old server name, which was no longer in existence. A quick change and a long-running problem was solved.