In our SCCM test environment we were installing this months Microsoft Security Updates and noticed on one test machine that all the Office 2003 Updates were failing. I hadn't seen this before, so I started to do a little digging.
Knowing that SCCM really doesn't do much but call the Windows Update Agent components, I first checked out the c:\windows\windowsupdate.log to see if there were any specific error messages relating to why these updates weren't installing. What I noticed was the following:
Handler : MSI transaction completed. MSI: 0x80070643, Handler: 0x8024200b, Source: No, Reboot: 0
We basically have two exit codes here. The handler tells me that WUA passed this on to MSI and MSI returned exit code 0x80070643. Windows Update (which is the Handler in this case) is saying its exit code is 0x8024200b. Based on both of these exit codes, we have a failure. The actual code we care about is the first one because that's what was returned to MSI. The second code is basically just a generic failure code.
By doing a search, I found that 0x80070643 relates to an issue with the Office Source Engine being disabled. Sure enough, on the machine we saw this issue happening on, it had the service disabled. Once we set it to manual, everything worked as normal. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903772 for more information.
So then I got to thinking, "How many machines in my environment have this service disabled? Our help desk could get flooded with calls." But then I realized that if this really were a wide spread issue with this service disabled, we'd have a lot more issues in previous months with Office 2003 updates. But nonetheless, I was curious, so I made a query in SCCM to look for all machines with the Office Source Engine disabled. The query syntax is as follows:
select distinct SMS_R_System.NetbiosName from SMS_R_System inner join SMS_G_System_SERVICE on SMS_G_System_SERVICE.ResourceID = SMS_R_System.ResourceId where SMS_G_System_SERVICE.Name = "ose" and SMS_G_System_SERVICE.StartMode = "Disabled"
How many machines came back with this service disabled? 4 (out of over 2000).
I think we're OK :)