Latest LCU not detected from WSUS if corresponding SSU preinstalled

Copper Contributor

Hi,


for a few months now, the SSU is bundled with the LCU. I have noticed that, if the bundled SSU is manually preinstalled with e.g. DISM, the corresponding LCU portion will no longer be detected as applicable from WSUS! It will however be detected if I scan against WU directly. WSUS will even show the entire bundle as installed for clients which only have the SSU portion installed!

 

This doesn't seem like a common scenario, however it becomes a huge problem if a device does a feature upgrade (from media or WSUS, doesn't matter) from an older version (<= 1909) to 20H2, with the "/DynamicUpdate NoLCU" option enabled. What seems to happen is, Windows Setup does not, as instructed, download and apply the latest LCU, but will still download and apply the latest SSU! This results in an installation that's effectively stuck at the LCU of the upgrade media used (currently 2020-11 for the WSUS upgrade package) and cannot upgrade to the current LCU, if WSUS is used as the only update source - at least until a newer LCU is released and approved. And since SSUs cannot be uninstalled, there is no easy workaround for affected machines.

 

I don't know if anyone from the WSUS team reads this, but there seems to be a faulty "is installed" detection logic in the SSU+LCU bundles published to WSUS, that needs to be addressed asap. Right now I have 35 Windows 10 clients stuck at the November '20 LCU, unable to upgrade.

 

Can anybody else confirm this problem?

 

Regards,
Markus

2 Replies

It got worse with this May's Patch Tuesday.

 

Now, when only the SSU portion of the 2021-05 Cumulative Update is installed manually, the LCU package is in fact offered by WSUS!


However, the client won't install anything. It will show the "2020-05 Cumulative Update" as installed in the update history, suggesting to the user that everything is fine. After a reboot, "system info" reveals that we're still on version 10.0.19042.631 from last November. This is really bad...

 

Regards,
Markus

For anyone else having this issue: This seems to be caused by having express update files enabled in WSUS. After disabling them (and losing some hair over how to correctly purge the related files and metadata from WSUS and how to make the clients not want to still download them), this issue went away.