MicrosoftHey sutliff1805,
sorry, it was a mental shortcut in my comment with the svchost.exe - that it's the local policy, as you write there can be a lot of things behind it. I did enable GPO debug logging, so I can see that when the registry change happens, there is noise in the GPO debug log and I can see the registry entries being removed and UpdateServiceUrlAlternate is not always re-created, hence I'm stating it's policy that is causing the issue.
I have a few VMs, where I monitor the registry and 2 of them have the same GPOs applied as all client devices in the environment and they have the issue occasionally, annother VM is in the Computers container in AD - it gets only 2 GPOs and the local policy - this one had no registry changes for 3 weeks and then the registry entries were removed and recreated. I've disabled local policy processing on this VM this week and I'm going to observe if the issue happens again, but it's going to take time ...
I have one GPO that configures "DOdownloadMode", maybe that could be connected - on the other hand the one VM in the Computers container doesn't have that GPO applied and it's registry entries were re-created. So it doesn't have a content download issue (0% downloading), but as far as I understand it, there had to be a conflict as the registry entries were removed and re-created.
I also have an observation on my daily laptop, the registry entries were untouched for 11 days, before being re-created (without UpdateServiceUrlAlternate), it looks like the further from last patching session, the issue is observed less often.
