After this weekends updates, four of our office PC’s exhibited the same problem. An application popup with a title of svchost.exe and a “the memory could not be read” error.
Click OK on this button and your computer freezes. Seems to be a pretty common problem, see here and here.
The procedure to fix this is
reboot
immediately open a command prompt
run “net stop wuauserv”
run “net stop bits”
run “del /q /s %windir%/softwaredistribution
Worked for me! Many thanks.
Phil.
This worked for me as well, but I had to change the last “/” to a “\”.
worked for me as well! thnx al lot!
Thank’s a lot for putting out this information. It worked right away and you saved me from going crazy! Found more info googling “svchost.exe” but this was the one that worked for me! Thank’s again!!!!
Thanks very much, this was it OK. The SoftwareDistribution folder must have been corrupted. After doing this, if you return to Microsoft Update, it sees you as not having the software and will reinstall it, creating a new SoftwareDistribution folder and populating it.
Thanks for the svchost fix. I search all over the place and found nothing that made sense, or even look close to a fix. Until I stumbled accross your site. Carried out the procedure and it seems to have fixed the problem. Well done and thank you.
Saved my day literally, spent 5 hours in troubleshooting!!!!!
Smack!!!!
Stefania
Hey this worked for me aswell, until i reboot, any idea how to fix it long term?
Thanks for the fix! I spent the weekend trying every recommendation under the son, and this is what did the trick.
This worked for me as well, but I had to change the last “/†to a “\â€.
Good tip! Didn’t had to stop the service, I just renamed the directory as SoftwareDistribution.bak to be safe, ran the WindowsUpdate web console, and it went well…
Thanks a lot for this “undocumented feature”