Windows 10: KB4551762 causes error 0x800f0988/0x800f0900

[German]On March 12, 2020, Microsoft released the KB4551762 unscheduled security update to close the CVE-2020-0796 SMBv3 vulnerability in Windows 10 V190x and corresponding Windows Server version. However, user messages reporting installation errors (0x800f0988/0x800f0900) are now accumulating.

Security update KB4551762 for CVE-2020-0796

Update KB4551762 is available for Windows 10 version 1903, Windows Server version 1903, Windows 10 version 1909, and Windows Server version 1909 and raises the build to 18362.720 (Windows 10 V1903) and 18363.720 (Windows 10 V1909). See my blog post Windows 10: Patch for SMBv3 Vulnerability CVE-2020-0796.

Update installation fails with error code

In the blog post Windows 10: Patch for SMBv3 Vulnerability CVE-2020-0796 there is the feedback from reader Paul F.

I wanted to download this update right away, but again I get the error 0x800f0988 during installation.

I already had this error last month and had to do an in-place upgrade. So far it worked; the regular cumulative update from Tuesday ran without errors, nothing has changed on the system since then.

Now the error occurs again and I would have to do another in-place upgrade to update to the current version. It's so annoying what a lot of work you have to do to bring your system up to date.

Blog reader Tim has posted a follow-up comment and reports a different installation error.

For me it's error 0x800f0900 – it's slowly etching me up, what are they doing in Redmond? I already had problems with the update, which corrupts the user profile, and now I have one again…

This error code 0x800f0988 is also confirmed by this blog reader, where two machines are affected.

Both errors were also criticized by users in the blog post Windows: Patchday-Probleme März 2020? Blog reader Uli reported here the error code 0x800f0900 for update KB453599.

What do the error codes mean?

Both error codes 0x800f0900 and 0x800f0988 are not really documented in the sources I normally use. From the decoding, 0x800 stands for the error flag and ox0f for FACILITY_SETUPAPI, which means an error in the setup. But there are two secondary sources where I can still extract details.

• 0x800f0900 stands for CBS_E_XML_PARSER_FAILURE (see my article Windows 10 V1803: Install issues with update KB4284835). An error occurred while parsing the Component Based Servicing memory (CBS). This means that simply broken update files were found there.
• 0x800f0988 stands for PSFX_E_INVALID_DELTA_COMBINATION (see also here) German blog reader Matthias also gives this error description in this comment. In this cause you could go through the following notes.

Microsoft suggests for the error code 0x800f0988 in this support post the deletion of the startup components via dism command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup

In this technet forum thread such a case is described for the January 2020 update KB4528760 and probably worked. If the approach does not help, you can go through the following steps.

• For both error codes you could try if a file system check with repair by dism helps (see Check and repair Windows system files and component store).
• What else you can check: Are the latest Servicing Stack Updates (SSUs) installed on the machine.
• It would also be worth a try to install the package manually after downloading it from the Microsoft Update Catalog.
• And you can try to empty the update cache by renaming the folders SoftwareDistribution and CatRoot2.

Another possibility would be to copy the CBS.log in the folder C:\Windows\Logs\CBS to the desktop and open it in an editor. Then go through the entries and go through the lines before the error code. Sometimes you can find a hint which files are criticized.

If these measures don't help (I've often read in the forums that this usually doesn't help people who are affected), you can try an in-place upgrade (over-installing the appropriate Windows 10 version from a running Windows 10).

Addendum: This update kills also user profiles, as this comment indicates.