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MarkusKoehler
New Member
July 18, 2024
Question

Windows updates fails with enabled Forticlient

  • July 18, 2024
  • 24 replies
  • 14993 views

Since last week we experiencing a lot of problems with Windows updates (mostly Windows 11, but there was one Windows 10 among them as well), specifically KB5040442. On about 10% of our Windows clients the update would start and go until 96% and stay there for 10-60 minutes, and then after a restart Windows would tell us that something did go wrong and it would reverse the update. This would require multiple restarts and anything in the order of 2-10h. The usual information sources did not reveal anything unusual with this update round, so it had to be some uncommon conditions here.

 

When Windows was back online, it would sometimes (!) show an error code 0x800f0922, oftenly nothing, and on next restart it would try to install it again (and our employees losing again 4-10h with a working computer). First remedy, as described in the error code was to increase the size of the recovery partition to at least 250MB, but that helped only on one computer. No other things related to the code did apply to us or help. DISM and SFC sometimes would find something, but did not help in fixing the issues with the update. Over time some of the computers randomly succeeded in installing the update.

 

Last straw I had was to disable and uninstall Forticlient. And with that so far all of the clients went through the update without a hitch. Now I am anxious that it will return with the next update when I reinstall Forticlient. In retrospective, two computers had some troubles with some previous updates, but we re-installed Windows on them. Both were also affected this time.

 

What should be do and how can we prevent that from happening again? Is there anything to further debug and diagnose this issue?

 

For your reference we use Forticlient 7.2.4.0972 with EMS, and a Fortigate 200F as main firewalls. We have the web filter, AV and real-time protection enabled, as well as Anti-malware, Anti-Exploit and Cloud-base malware protection.

 

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

Regards,

Markus

24 replies

sahmed_FTNT
Staff & Editor
Staff & Editor
July 20, 2024

Hello, I would suggest checking EMS profile for affected end users

VinceMoon
New Member
August 14, 2024

Did you ever get an answer to this? I'm using a very similar set up to you and we experienced similar issues with the July updates.

MarkusKoehler
New Member
August 15, 2024

Hi Vince.

 

No, we didn't get this fully resolved. Our solution is still to put the computers with update troubles temporarily in a group with disabled malware protection, do the update, then re-enable.Just this morning one of the computers in the previous update failure round just did it again. We couldn't find any useful logs that would give us any insight in what's going on and how to prevent it in the future.

 

This is so frustrating, but it's a little relief, that we're not the only ones suffering there, as it drove me crazy that there was no general news on anything like that whatsoever.

 

 

This is frustrating, but I'm kind of relieved that we don't seem to be the only ones affected by this.

VinceMoon
New Member
August 15, 2024

Yes it's great to see someone else suffering if you know what I mean!

 

We are also experiencing it with the August updates too. When you say you disabled malware protection, do you mean on Forticlient using EMS? Our "Malware Protection" profile has Antivirus Protection, Anti-Ransomware, Anti Exploit, Cloud based Malware Protection and Removeable Media Access all set to off (and always have been). Under Advanced, under Other we have scan for rootkits, adware, riskware, email and notify logged in users and on and other settings off. Are you using ZTNA at all?

MarkusKoehler
New Member
August 15, 2024

Hi Vince.

 

Debugging the issue was quite a pain, because everything we tried, meant either wait for 6h for the computer to get back to when the solution wouldn't work, or it would work and then this computer was basically burnt for debugging.And most of the people were eager to get their computer back up and running fast, so the ones we had for debugging were seriously limited.

 

So, in order to circle out the area where to look for, I first went for uninstalling Forticlient entirely on one computer, which solved the issue. Then I just removed it from EMS, but left Forticlient installed, to make sure it wasn't a general thing with the file filter drivers, but only when the module was actually active. This worked as well. Then I created a policy for those PCs, where all the options in Malware protection you mentioned are off. Also in this profile we disabled the Firewall and Sandbox protection. After that, we basically ran out of PCs to test it with, so I couldn't fine tune it any further.

 

> Are you using ZTNA at all?

No, it's disabled for us.

 

Regards,

Markus

arahman
Staff
Staff
October 3, 2024

Hi, I could not find any know issues with the forticlient but I found another community forum which had the same issue and making changes to the windows 11 PC helped the users, please check this forum if this helps you.


https://community.fortinet.com/t5/Support-Forum/Windows-11-22H2-update-FortiClient-VPN-doesn-t-work/td-p/225125

rgs-araujo
Visitor III
October 3, 2024

Hi Arahman, thanks for the reply.

But I think the link you gave (vpn stops working after windows update) doesn't seem to be related to the issue in this thread (windows update fails or takes too long).

awiesel
New Member
November 7, 2024

Hello arahman,

 

I am a colleague of MarkusKoehler. Our problem does not seem to be related to the VPN. Both in-house clients (on-fabric, SSL VPN off) and clients connected via VPN have the problem.

 

The problem still persists with Windows 11 24H2 and FortiClient 7.2.5. One of our computers tried to install the October cumulative update four times without success and rolled back for two hours on a Dell Vostro with i7, 16GB and SSD. After disabling FortiClient Malware Protection completely via EMS, updates installed smooth within five minutes. This happened yesterday.

 

Support already had a look on the issue (see Ticket #9947946) and got detailed debug logs from us. They advised us to disable cloud protection in the forti client, without any success as it seems.

 

The situation is very frustrating for our users and even causes some damage, since a rollback usually takes at least one hour and the machine is not usable in that time, if we are not reachable to disable FortiClient. If you have any further information or instructions for troubleshooting, please let us know. I will try to grab the Windows update error code from the machine as soon as I can get my hands on it.

VinceMoon
New Member
November 7, 2024

It's still plaguing us as well. Moving the machine to a profile in EMS that doesn't "do" as much does seem to help, although that's not addressing the root cause. There was a bug listed in forticlient 7.4 (bug id 1022885 "Forticlient causes bootup delay on Windows 10 and 11) in New known issues but no mention of it on the 7.4.1 known issues or new issues document. I also note the MS release health issue WI893288 which may be related. Have you reviewed your CBS.log?

 

I'm updating Microsoft Visual c++ 2015 2022 redistributable to the latest version as well for good measure, as the version of the 2017 redistributable that is included in the FortiClientTools zip file is older than the one in the latest Microsoft Visual c++ 2015 2022 redistributable update.

VinceMoon
New Member
November 7, 2024

I also found this topic which sounds similar Forticlient slowing down Windows 11 update 24h2 - Fortinet Community

awiesel
New Member
November 14, 2024

Thank you for the tip with the CBS log. Due to the size of the logs, I had it analyzed by ChatGPT. All it found was a collision of some registry values:

 

 

  • 2024-11-06 09:17:28, Info CSI 0000005c Warning: Overlap: Registry value collision found under key \\REGISTRY\\MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Classes\\Record\\{9E5C3C99-D046-3FE5-9921-21CF0F0A08FF}\\4.0.0.0\\ for Assembly, only one component should set this value

  • 2024-11-06 09:17:28, Info CSI 0000005f Warning: Overlap: Registry value collision found under key \\REGISTRY\\MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Classes\\Record\\{9E5C3C99-D046-3FE5-9921-21CF0F0A08FF}\\4.0.0.0\\ for RuntimeVersion, only one component should set this value

  • 2024-11-06 09:17:28, Info CSI 00000062 Warning: Overlap: Registry value collision found under key \\REGISTRY\\MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Classes\\Record\\{9E5C3C99-D046-3FE5-9921-21CF0F0A08FF}\\4.0.0.0\\ for Class, only one component should set this value

  • 2024-11-06 09:17:28, Info CSI 00000065 Warning: Overlap: Registry value collision found under key \\REGISTRY\\MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Classes\\Record\\{8CF0278D-D0AD-307D-BE63-A785432E3FDF}\\4.0.0.0\\ for RuntimeVersion, only one component should set this value

  • 2024-11-06 09:17:28, Info CSI 00000068 Warning: Overlap: Registry value collision found under key \\REGISTRY\\MACHINE\\SOFTWARE\\Classes\\Record\\{8CF0278D-D0AD-307D-BE63-A785432E3FDF}\\4.0.0.0\\ for Assembly, only one component should set this value

According to ChatGPT, this key might be controlling access to the clipboard for .NET applications. Seems a little bit odd to me that this is crashing a Windows Update with FortiClient on.

 

Good news is, we have a client that fails reproducible when FCT is on. I sent the logfiles of the FCT to the support. Lets see what they figure out.

 

VinceMoon
New Member
November 14, 2024

Thanks for the reply. I can also confirm we are also seeing the same issue on the November update too.

 

I also see many (hundreds) value collision entries in my cbs.log files. Maybe we are using similar software or hardware. You can DM me if you want and maybe we can talk in more detail.

 

Great news that's you've got a client to test on, can't wait for this to be put to bed. Would you mind sharing your ticket number so I can also raise my own and ask them to reference yours?

awiesel
New Member
November 21, 2024

Good morning VinceMoon,

our first ticket on the issue was 9947946 from Sep/Oct, but that one is closed after Fortinet concluded to turn off cloud protection and retry. Unfortunately, that didn't help. The recent ticket is 10076718, Fortinet is analyzing the logs right now.

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