What is Error 8000FFFF when I try to install a Windows Vista Update?

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I have tried all of these, have contacted HP and Microsoft. At least the HP people tried to help, never heard word one from MS in 3 weeks!.

I am returning my computer for a Mac.

This worked for me after a load of abortive solutions:

regedit: delete or rename (eg add OLD to the end ) the string "AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving"
found in HKLM\Components /AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving

Be safe backup your registry first though !!!No liability accepted if you screw your system.

good luck.

Solution that worked for me on error 8000FFFF installing Windows update KB929777, was this:
Go to Control Panel click on Programs in Programs and Features, click on View installed Updates. 1.Scroll to the hotfix KB929777 and uninstall it.
2.Reboot
3.Reinstall the update
4.Reboot.

Keep trying that until it installs successfully.

I cant Find HKLM\Components /AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving in Regedit.

All i have is:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT
HKEY_CURRENT_USER
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
HKEY_USERS
HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG

Where do i go in here ?

PS: ive tried all sergestions.

Figlet

It's a sub category of HKEY-LOCAL MACHINE

This one worked great for me

I found this at Microsoft TechNet and it did the trick for me.

1) Launch REGEDIT

2) Go into HKLM\COMPONENTS, and check if these three values exist under the COMPONENTS key:

PendingXmldentifier
NextQueueEntryIndex
AdvancedInstallersNeedResolving

3) Providing they do exist, back up the Components key, then delete the three above values.
4) Restart the computer, and Windows Update should now be working fine.

Posted by: Eric M. at September 21, 2007 07:42 AM

By the way the issue with only 3.326Gb is if you have Vista 32bit installed this is the maximum th eOS can see and use as with ALL 32bit MS OS`s if you have 64Bit OS you will see the full 4gb. Hope this helps in some way.

Be warned if you use a 64bit version of Windows that many hardware manufacturers don't make 64bit drivers. It's the reason I use 32bit Vista on my machine. If hardware manufacturers would just open their specs up, it would be a win for everyone.

Tried Sudheer GN's suggestion, didn't work for me on a Dell Vista Ultimate 64-bit with 16 GB RAM.

But then I tried the fix suggested by Aval, which was, uninstall update KB929777, then restart, then update, then restart. I've restarted twice since then and both times it's told me that all updates have been installed correctly!

So easy! Sheesh, and this was AFTER opening the machine up to take out some RAM as directed elsewhere, and realizing that my 16GB RAM is in 4 4GB sticks, so it wouldn't've helped anyway...

And then after trying some convoluted method on another site in which you have your machine pretend that it has less RAM than it actually has...that one caused a blue screen of death, and I was dang lucky to be able to get things back to normal, since the instructions on that site for getting back to normal didn't work!

So thanks!

Apparently the KB292777 DOES install correctly, but Vista for some reason doesn't recognize that it's installed and so keeps prompting you. But it shows up in the list of updates you can uninstall, so it must just be some notification bug.

Thanks again, that lousy error message was driving me nuts.

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