My Windows box was having trouble recently, automatic updates was detected as off by the security center, but it was apparently on… but it wasn’t, and also file sharing buggered up, access denied for everyone. I’m not sure whether it was spyware, or some sort of corrupt Windows update, anyway I did the regular spyware / virus scan, it found a couple of things, nothing too out of the ordinary. The only thing I needed to do was do a whole bunch of Googling to see who else had the issue. Quite a few had the Auto updates problem, so I started with that. I found a fix for it, which also fixed the file sharing problem, happy days! I found the fix right here, but here’s the basics:

Might or might not work -

Register the file wuaueng.dll:
Click Start, select Run
Type: regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
Press OK.

Pretty straight forward, worked like a charm!