I've been having issues with psexec so I've been migrating to use winrs (part of the winrm system). It's a very nice remoting tool which is proving to be more reliable then psexec. Wuinstall is used to install available windows updates. The two however don't play well together. I'm working on a verity of windows servers 2003, 2008 and 2008r2. Wuinstall behaves the same across all hosts and behaves as expected if executed locally by the same user.

Command:

winrs -r:server wuinstall /download

Produces

WUInstall.exe Version 1.1

Copyright by hs2n Informationstechnologie GmbH 2009

Visit:  http://www.xeox.com, http://www.hs2n.at for new versions

Searching for updates ... Criteria: IsInstalled=0 and Type='Software'
Result Code: Succeeded
7 Updates found, listing all:
   Security Update for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition (KB2544893)
   Security Update for .NET Framework 3.5.1 on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008
 R2 SP1 for x64-based Systems (KB2518869)
   Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1 on Windows 7 and Windows S
erver 2008 R2 SP1 for x64-based Systems (KB2539635)
   Security Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5.1 on Windows 7 and Windows S
erver 2008 R2 SP1 for x64-based Systems (KB2572077)
   Security Update for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition (KB2588516)
   Security Update for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition (KB2620704)
   Security Update for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 Edition (KB2617657)
Downloading updates ...
Error occured: CreateUpdateDownloader failed!
Result CODE: 0x80070005
Return code: 1

Googling "0x80070005" finds "unspecified error" which isn't helpful.

Thoughts? Is there a better way?