Windows Update svchost problems and fix

September 18, 2006 in IT by CmdrChalupa | 12 comments

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

  1. Phil’s avatar

    Phil on October 18, 2006 at 2:38 am

    Worked for me! Many thanks.
    Phil.

  2. Mark’s avatar

    Mark on October 22, 2006 at 11:53 pm

    This worked for me as well, but I had to change the last “/” to a “\”.

  3. nitsua’s avatar

    nitsua on March 13, 2007 at 1:02 pm

    worked for me as well! thnx al lot!

  4. Catharina from Sweden’s avatar

    Catharina from Sweden on April 10, 2007 at 3:18 pm

    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!!!!

  5. Mike From Colorado’s avatar

    Mike From Colorado on April 10, 2007 at 4:17 pm

    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.

  6. Don’s avatar

    Don on May 5, 2007 at 6:21 pm

    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.

  7. Vijay Patodi’s avatar

    Vijay Patodi on May 10, 2007 at 12:25 am

    Saved my day literally, spent 5 hours in troubleshooting!!!!!

  8. Stefania’s avatar

    Stefania on May 11, 2007 at 10:32 pm

    Smack!!!!

    Stefania

  9. Mark’s avatar

    Mark on May 16, 2007 at 6:07 am

    Hey this worked for me aswell, until i reboot, any idea how to fix it long term?

  10. Kevin’s avatar

    Kevin on May 29, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    Thanks for the fix! I spent the weekend trying every recommendation under the son, and this is what did the trick.

  11. Jabu’s avatar

    Jabu on June 3, 2007 at 8:19 am

    This worked for me as well, but I had to change the last “/” to a “\”.

  12. Curzon’s avatar

    Curzon on July 6, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    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” :)