Patch Tuesday Blues
Today my friends is Patch Tuesday and like any good security professional (J) I went up to Microsoft Update to get my monthly dose of patches. 9 of them installed fine however one just would not install despite repeated tries. Specifically this was Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework, Version 1.1 Service Pack 1 (KB928366). The same update applied to my .NET 2.0 installation without any trouble but with .NET 1.1 I was consistently getting this error in the Microsoft Update History.
Anyways I proceeded to manually download the hotfix using the link for Windows Service Pack 2 and .NET 1.1 Service Pack 1. Now when I proceeded to run this hotfix, it prompted me for the file netfx.msi which it couldn't find. Now netfx.msi is actually part of the original .NET install but gets deleted when the install completes successfully. So to get a hold of it I went back to the Microsoft website and downloaded the .NET 1.1 Service Pack 1 installer – only problem is this file is called dotnetfx.exe. Well contained within it though is netfx.msi, so all I had to do was extract netfx.msi out using the following command "dotnetfx.exe /t:c:\temp /c" and then point the waiting hotfix installer to the recently extract netfx.msi. In a couple of seconds the installation completes and I am fully patched waiting for the next Patch Tuesday J.
If anyone runs into this issue, hopefully this will help you.
UPDATE: Since I posted this I have received well over 100 responses, some thanking me and others asking for help with other errors. Unfortunately I am not going to be able to figure out every error message out. Bear in mind that Microsoft does provide free support for any security updates related issues so this might be an opportunity to take them up on that.