Dave-H

Thanks. So you sometimes have the message and sometimes not? That's very strange. I'm going to wait until after patch Tuesday next week to see if it's a temporary glitch that will be fixed then, but I'm not holding out too much hope! I guess that this isn't being seen commonly, or more people would have said so. The strange thing is that I can't see any disabled options on the pages with the message, and I'm not aware of any being missing either.

Not directly relevant to Windows updates, but I just thought I'd mention for those still using it that there was another update for Adobe Reader 11 a few weeks ago, to version 11.0.20. You can get it here if you want it.

OK, I removed the entire "WindowsUpdate" key, along with its subkeys of course. Unfortunately this has made no difference, even after several reboots, the red message is still there. Strangely, although I have tried changing the Windows Update settings, the key has not been restored. Is it something to do with Group Policy, which I don't use and have disabled? Do you think I should restore the key, or is it something that does not matter?

I haven't, but I will! How far back should I delete? Presumably not just the DWORD entry. Should I delete the whole "WindowsUpdate" key, as it has no other entries under it?

I seem to remember that this has happened before, probably towards the end of last year, where there were a couple of versions of the PPAPI plugin actually released that did not work properly, even in some current versions of Chromium-based browsers. It's probably a regression that's slipped in, and this time it hopefully will be addressed before the release.

Sorry for the delay in responding. It does exist, and contains a single DWORD entry "NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers" which is set to 0. Since I last posted here, I've found some more people asking about this on the MS help forums, but no answer as yet.

Just bumping this to say I've found a fix, or at least a workaround. If you browse to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData\S-1-5-18\ReadOnly\LockScreen_P\ there you will find the cave picture lurking. I replaced it with another jpg image, keeping the same file name, and now I have that on the default lock screen. How long this will "stick" for I have no idea, but it's been OK for several days now. Hope this helps anyone in the future wanting to change this, as the change facility still doesn't work in version 1703 of Windows 10 Pro, and there are stories of it not even working properly in the Enterprise version, which it is supposed to do!

I'm pretty sure that the first method no longer works. The last version I had working like that was 15.4.22, later versions won't now run properly, even with the compatibility mode set, and just throw error messages.

Unfortunately, in my experience the Dropbox server will block access if it detects what it considers to be an out of date version.

Well I certainly haven't applied any group policies. How would you disable "Delivery Optimization"? I will check that out, although I haven't done it knowingly.

Opera 12.02 is the last version that works on Windows 98SE, even with KernelEx.

Thanks, that's interesting that you're seeing the same thing on a clean install! I suspect the notice appeared on mine after the first update was applied, which was a Flash Player update. It definitely wasn't there straight away. I'm just interested to know if everyone is seeing this, and what exactly is supposedly being "hidden" on the page! I am of course an administrator on the system, so I can't imagine why anything would be hidden or disabled on Windows Update. Searching online about this brings up virtually nothing, the only other references to that notice seem to apply to the customisation page where you change things like the lock screen image, where it appears if you have things disabled using Group Policy settings. I couldn't find any references to it appearing on the Windows Update page.

I recently updated Windows 10 to version 1703, the so-called "Creators Update", and everything seemed to go fine. However, a strange thing has suddenly appeared on my Windows Update settings page. At the top, it now says, in red, "*Some settings are hidden or managed by your organisation". This was not there straight after the update, it suddenly appeared a while later, and I haven't knowingly changed anything that would have made it appear. It's also there on the page if I click on "Advanced options", but nowhere else. Anyone any idea what is actually hidden or disabled here, and why? I'm using Windows 10 Pro 64bit.

Yes Heinoganda is brilliant, his updating program for the Root Certificates alone is amazing!

Good news! How did you actually get the updates to install? Did you use @heinoganda's roll-up version, and did you do it normally or using the Recovery Console?

@SD73 I've never had any luck either with System Restore on one of my XP machines. Every time I've tried to use it, on any restore point, it goes through the motions and then just says "the system could not be restored" without giving any reason. Your problem is certainly a very strange one. My only thought, and it's clutching at straws, is would it perhaps be possible to try installing the updates with the standalone installer files when booted into the Recovery Console? I have no idea whether they will even work in that environment, but just a thought.

Indeed so, but KB40414580 is an update specifically for .NET 2.0 SP2, as can be seen from its standalone file name. One strange anomaly was that on my netbook, but not on my main machine, after I successfully installed all the updates, I was then prompted to install a further five .NET 2.0 updates, which presumably weren't installed before. They took ages to install, and I was dreading that there would then be another prompt to install KB40414580, and then the five updates again, and so on round and round for ever, but fortunately that doesn't seem to have been the case. Whew!

Just to report all 13 updates installed OK on both my machines. Strangely my main machine never showed a yellow shield in the system tray, whereas my netbook did. It took about 20 minutes to scan with Microsoft Update on my main machine, on the netbook it took a couple of hours! I guess that's because it's a pretty weak machine. The .NET updates took ages to install, but they always seem to.

I never used ClearType when I had a tube monitor of course, but since I've had a flat screen monitor I actually do think it's better, as long as it's correctly tuned of course, which is a very big "if"! Do you have the ClearType Tuner for XP installed? If not, you should give it a try. Even if you still don't like the result, at least you will have made sure that it's as optimised as it can be, because if it isn't, the results can be truly horrendous!

Not a gratuitous bump, although I've just had to completely re-backup all my files again today as the clocks changed, which is what's made me think of this. As well as the already documented here issue of backing up a FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive, I've also noticed another strange thing that I've now confirmed happens when the clocks change. I have a lot of my archive drive folders set to "thumbnail" view mode, for images and video files, and every time the clocks change, all of the thumbnails seem to have to be re-created. Why would that be? This is completely on a FAT32 drive, no NTFS issues. Surely if all the files on the drive have their timestamps changed when the computer clock moves forwards or backwards an hour, by the same amount, why should that cause the thumbnails (stored in the thumbs.db files) to have to all be regenerated?

A noticeable improvement here too, although I must say that I hadn't actually noticed a problem. Thanks!

I had this problem with my dual boot netbook that it would boot fine into Windows 8.1 in AHCI mode, but not into XP. Installing the Intel Application Accelerator fixed it perfectly for me, but I don't know if that was the preferred solution!

The .NET update seems to have installed fine for me with no problems. Scanning the versions of my .NET system files, it seems to have updated quite a few.

I wasn't knowingly pushed with KB4012864, no yellow shield appeared, but just as a test I tried doing a scan on Microsoft Update. Not only did it then appear as a high priority update, so I installed it from there, I was very pleased to find that the scan completed in only about 30 seconds. Whether this will be the same come the next patch Tuesday remains to be seen!

Thanks! Does that .NET update supersede any others, and why does it say it's a "preview"?