Third party firewalls can cause Vista update errors
By Jonathan Schlaffer
It’s important for all users of any version of Windows to keep it updated with the latest patches from Microsoft and it should be as easy as clicking the “Check for Updates” button but that’s not always the case. Certain third party firewalls may prevent Vista from checking for updates.
In particular the error “Windows is unable to check for updates, error 80070643″ may occur. A Microsoft support document says this is related to Office 2003/Office 2007 regarding the Office Source Engine which may have been corrupted or missing. The article suggests replacing the ose.exe file from the Office CD or uninstalling and reinstalling office.
For many users this does not fix the issue because it fails to take into account that some of us are not happy with the pitiful excuse of a firewall that Microsoft provides and are running a third party firewall.
The Comodo Firewall in particular has been known to cause this error but may be caused by others. Disabling the firewall will not fix the situation, you will have to uninstall the firewall completely, restart the system and then install the updates.
It’s not been confirmed if, after installing the updates, that the firewall can be reinstalled and Windows update will function correctly. If not, it can be uninstalled again.
Uninstalling the firewall may also cause the Security Center to report that it is still installed despite not being there, there is a fix for this right here.
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January 13th, 2008
I encountered this error when installing ‘Update for Windows Vista (KB943411)’, it has something to do with ‘improving the protection in the slidebar’.
Do you know of any other fix than uninstalling Comodo? I’m not using the slidebar, and am not too keen to go through trouble to better protect my slidebar (which i’ve never used).
January 13th, 2008
I don’t know of any other way to fix this particular problem than to uninstall Comodo, some have reported mixed results using various workarounds but the most effective way is to just get rid of Comodo and use another firewall, I replaced it with Vista Firewall Control.