Dave-H

OK, I did my tests, with resounding success! As I thought, uninstalling KB4501226 did not produce a result, as it's no longer actually offered to POSReady 2009 systems. Uninstalling its predecessor, KB4487990 produced the desired result though, as you can see above. So, It's all working!

Thank you so much for all that work! I'm sure this will be very useful to others in the future. The use of ProxHTTPSProxyMII when it was first ported to XP by @heinoganda, and now HTTPSProxy with its much improved control system, fixed a huge number of internet access incompatibilities for me in XP. I would heartily recommend to all XP users to use one or the other of them now as a matter of course!

The "cannot connect" error message was back in my System Event Log this morning. I did have some connection problems earlier on though, so that could have caused it, I'll wait to see if it happens again tomorrow. If it doesn't reoccur, I will try the update uninstall test then.

No sign of the yellow shield after unhiding one of my hidden hardware updates, but I guess that's because it's an optional update. What I think I'll do now to test it is to uninstall the latest time zones update, as that will do no damage if there's a problem. The last one for POSReady2009 was KB4501226, on 11/06/19. That was widely considered to have been a mistake by Microsoft though, as support had ended, and it's not now available in the catalogue. I have got its installation file, but I suspect that if I remove it, it won't appear as an update as it's effectively been withdrawn for POSReady2009. The previous one was KB4487990, issued on 10/04/19. I will try removing that, and see if Automatic Updates prompts me to reinstall it.

Well my system is already set up exactly as yours is now, and has been for some time, that is to say with Automatic Updates set to "notify" mode. Presumably it was its checks which were generating the Event Log error messages, which seem to have now stopped, although I'll need another couple of days to confirm that. Does that mean that it's now working? As you say, I guess the only way to know for sure is to artificially trigger a missing update. I do have some hidden hardware updates, I could just try unhiding one of those I guess.

OK, I'll give that a try and report back. Since ticking "Automatically Detect Settings" in my Internet LAN settings I've not seen the Event Log error message, so that may well have fixed that. I'll have to leave it a few more days to be sure though, the messages were appearing every 24 hours.

Yes, I could do that, but I don't really want to risk it just for a speculative test! I have "Startup Delayer" installed and running for other reasons, so I could delay the service start with that. There's no native way of doing it in XP AFAIK. Thanks, that's very helpful and makes perfect sense. You say your Automatic Updates Control Panel applet doesn't work? Is it all greyed out, or does it not open at all?

wuauclt /detectnow appears to do nothing, and there's no event in the Event Viewer. I guess that means it's not working! It doesn't generate the error message either. I'll try changing the LAN settings. Obviously i'm not expecting the shield to pop up in the system tray again anytime soon, but it would be interesting to see if it's possible to get the automatic checks working again.

Thanks, but I was thinking more of whether @maile3241is getting the error messages, as they seem to already have automatic updates enabled. I'm not sure how it could show the yellow shield if it can't connect.

Well I do have HTTPSProxy running all the time, as I need it to display my e-mails properly in Eudora. So you're not getting the Event Log error messages?

I'm still seeing this in my System Event Log regularly. I still have automatic updates set to tell me if there are any! I guess this is because it can't use the proxy.

I think @xpandvistafanwas saying that they had already installed SP2 (for Office 2010) and it was the post SP2 updates that were taking a long time. I do remember that there was an awful lot of them!

It used to be like that a few years ago, on my low powered netbook I would leave it scanning overnight, and sometimes it hadn't even found the updates then! IIRC it was something to do with too many previous Internet Explorer updates clogging the system (or something like that). At least you did eventually get the updates, and I do remember them taking a while when I first installed and updated Office 2010, so I don't think this is unusual. You just have to be patient and be glad you only have to do it once! It's probably still quicker than identifying all the updates and then downloading them from the catalogue and installing them all manually!

No I haven't excluded HTTPSProxy (I'm no longer using ProxHTTPSProxy) from Malwarebytes. I will give that a try, just excluding the HTTPSProxy folder.

Thanks largely to you! I do get full speed using Firefox 52.9 ESR, which doesn't use the proxy. There is no difference if I switch off Malwarebytes' web scanning. The speed hit is only noticeable if I use 360Chrome with the "Use IE proxy" option enabled. Fortunately you can easily switch it off. This does result in a few padlocks not being green in the address bar, but I've not found any site yet which doesn't work in that configuration.

Yes of course!

Just for completeness, now working fine in 360Chrome 13.5.

No it isn't that. As you say it's almost certainly just the processing that the proxy has to do which is casing a bottleneck. As reading a lot of my e-mails would be a very painful process without the proxy, I'll live with it!

No it doesn't matter, I was just wondering why the loss of speed was so great with a locally running proxy.

I started using a proxy because my ancient Eudora e-mail program uses the IE engine to display messages, and I started getting certificate errors popping up all the time. That's the only reason I have to use the proxy (and now for Microsoft Update on IE8 again of course!) so it's not really a problem. I was just a bit puzzled. I would expect some loss of speed, but not a third of what it should be!

Yes, I think I probably always imported the certificate by double clicking on it and using the wizard, which supposedly puts the certificate in the right store automatically! This time it obviously didn't put it where it needed to be. Just a couple of quick off-topic questions about HTTPSProxy. Do you know why there are two entries for HTTPSProxy.exe in Task Manager? Different PIDs and different memory usage. Also, would you expect using HTTPSProxy to significantly slow down your internet connection speed? This probably happened with ProxHTTPSProxyMII as well, but I never noticed it! Using 360Chrome, where you can easily switch the proxy off and on, on the Cloudflare speed test I'm getting 66Mbps with a direct connection, but only 21Mbps with the proxy enabled, an enormous difference! I know of course that online proxy servers are always very slow, when they work at all, but I'm surprised that a local proxy should cause such a speed hit. Is that expected?

Yes I did look at that tool thanks, I transferred the help file from the older version into the zip file of the newer version, and I will keep that. I hope now that I will never have to use it of course! I've reinstalled Chrome Frame, and restored my original SoftwareDistribution folder as a test, and I now have my original twelve years of update history back! Microsoft Update is still working fine, so they weren't a factor in it not working before. I'm still so pleased that this was fixed. All it took, and I thought that would be the case, was for you to see the apparent clock problem yourself on your system. Once you had it to directly work with, you fixed it, thank you again!

Yes indeed, so simple once you know! The automatic selection for the certificate import was obviously getting it wrong, at least for some of us! I still wonder why it worked for some and not others. You can do it through the Internet Options Control Panel applet if you select "show physical stores" BTW. Finally, all's well that ends well, and thank you so much everyone, especially of course @AstroSkipper, for sticking with this for so long. Cheers, Dave.

I see you're using ProxHTTPSProxyMII too, as I was originally. I'm now using HTTPSProxy, but the result is the same. This seems to prove to me that it doesn't matter which of those programs you use, the error can still happen. Assuming that all other settings and configurations are correct, I think the proxy server is very likely the cause of the certificate error, but we need to diagnose why it works for some people and not others, with apparently the same setup. For anyone who hasn't already noticed, the PM system is fixed BTW!

Already done, but I don't know how long it will take to address. The PMs were already faulty before the whole board went down on Tuesday. I've reported to @xperthe board owner that PMs are still down.