Someone...ANYone

I am having the same problem on a friend's computer. Microsoft has a number of posted fixes (registry edits etc), but they are all for old Win98/IE5.0 installs. This is the error message he gets.
 
"Your organization has decided to provide software updates internally rather than through Windows Update. To download updates for your Windows computer, please see your network administrator."
 
Oh, and this is happening in a single user machine always logged in as adminitrator, so you may not be able to update from any of your accounts. The only relevant change he made recently was to add a new user account which logs in (via VPN) to a remote domain account (his office). He was on SP1 and running IE5.5 I believe. We installed SP2 after that, so I don't think this is it.
 
here are some links (which as I said I found useless because the registry entries mentioned do not even exist under W2K) I got by searching google.com using the error message above. Curiously, searching for that phrase on Microsoft's own knowledgebase comes up with zilch. Way to go google!
 
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q283/2/88.ASP
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q228/5/48.ASP
http://www.windows-help.net/bbs/Forum6/HTML/002223.html
 
good luck and please post a fix if you find it (as I will if I am successful).
 
:}

Yup. No reg entries either. I've never come up with that problem before. Of course, I could do a reinstall, and that would most likely fix it, but I don't want to do that.
 
Well, at least I'm not the only one running into this, Dragon Lord. If I find a fix, I'll be sure to post it.

How can you enable this feature for all the accounts BUT Administrator?

Thought I'd mention this, just in case...
 
Had a friend who ran into the same problem. Turned out that she had installed Tweaki (not TweakUI, but Tweaki... for Power Users from JerMar Software) and had checked a security setting in that app which denied users access to the Windows Update site. I a third party "tweaker" installed on the system?

Not that I know of. His system is pretty stock...just out of the box.
 
Also, it clearly wasn't happening before we set his system up to log on to a remote serve via VPN (which required a reboot before it would authenticate on the domain).
 
The only weird software is Norton Internet Security, which I don't trust to save my life, but I cannot find any settings in it that would prohibit Windows Update from working. And the problem continues with or without disabling the NIS.
 
grrr..
 
:}

Just as an experiment for any system (not on a domain) suffering this problem, I might be tempted to suggest an experiment. What I have in mind is going into the Local Security Policy applet and, in the User Rights Assignment section of Local Policies, enabling the "Act as part of the operating system" item. (For anyone who's unfamiliar with this, just highlight the above-mentioned item, open the right-click context menu, select Security, and use the ensuing dialog to add the appropriate user (an Admin user, of course) to the item. Then right-click on the Security Settings item in the left pane of the Local Security Settings applet and select Reload from the context menu. (You'll lose the User Rights Assignment listing in the right pane, so you'll have to go back to it to confirm that the chosen user account is showing in the Effective Setting column.) After doing this, I'd attempt to go back to the Windows Update site to see if anything has changed.
 
I don't think I'd recommend leaving this setting intact, of course. Well, at least not unless the user concerned is the knowledgeable and cautious type. I just thought it might be worth trying to see if it would make a difference if the user was acting in this capacity with respect to permissions.
 
On the other hand, does anyone think that this could be a malfunction of some sort with the Windows Update communication process, and that the message about the administrator denying permissions is a red herring?
 
Regards,
Jim

ok, it fixed itself. nothing was updated on his system. nothing was changed. I asked him to check it and it worked today. so, wha' happun?
 
Windows 2000 does regularly attempt to restart/modify services that aren't working optimally, but I don't think any service here had failed or is even involved in Windows Update.
 
It is also possible that we stumbled on a problem with the Windows Update updater that has since been updated at MS HQ. (say that three times fast). So, if it nows works for some of you, this may have been a bug "at the factory." Somehow, I doubt it, unless we all hit something *very* infrequent.
 
Another option might be that some portion of the active X code used to run Windows Update on his machine was cached in his browser cache and over the past week or so it expired and then was downloaded/updated anew when he checked. I have a sneaking suspicion this might be it.
 
Regardless, it fixed itself (which is only appropriate since it broke itself). I do love Windows 2000...
 
:}

I am having a similar problem with XP - but I get the error message:
 
Network policy settings prevent you from using Windows Update to download and install updates on your computer.
 
If you believe you have received this message in error, please check with your system administrator.
 
 
I tried looking at those old reg hacks too, and nothing seems to work.