Windows updates fails with enabled Forticlient

[MarkusKoehler]

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

[awiesel]

Good morning everyone and a happy new year!

With 7.2.7 the issue seems to be resolved or got at least a lot better. We only had one client which made problems and took about one hour for the December updates. Other previously problematic clients ran the updates within a few minutes, this is fine.

What are your experiences with 7.2.7?

Regards

Arne

[VinceMoon]

Hi Arne,

Good to hear from you. December's updates haven't been a problem for us. We are still on 7.2.4 but turned a lot of security features off prior to the update. I also note that the December's patches are always quite "light". Also there was no .net updates in December. Fingers crossed for this month's patches!

[awiesel]

Good morning all. Seems like the issue is back. Windows Update KB5050009 and 24H2 are causing massive problems at our site which mostly go away when we turn off FortiClient completely. Anyone else experiencing that?