Windows Server 2008 R2 Update Issues and Role Errors

For sometime now we have been finding that some of our Windows Server 2008 R2 servers were not installing Windows Updates.

Some servers would not even find any updates, and others would simply get to the "Downloading..." screen and never progress any further. In addition we would also get an annoying problem in Server Manager; where the Roles and features are usually displayed, the window would be blank with a message that simply said "Error."

Cannot Open an Anonymous Level Security Token in IE

Recently I had an issue in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 Enterprise 64 Bit, when logging into a web page. Every time I logged in with the correct credentials it would flash and NOT open the secure page. The credentials were correct and the same page opened correctly on another computer.

Upon investigation I found the following error. This was found in the bottom left hand corner of the status bar in Internet Explorer.

"Cannot open an Anonymous Level Security Token"

Error When Trying to Install WSUS on Server 2008

Due to one of our server's operating system corrupting on us, we had to rebuild it with a fresh install of Windows Server 2008 R2. This server amongst other things ran Windows Server Update Services for our entire network.

We got everything reinstalled and working fine from scratch until it came to installing WSUS.

Everytime we tried to install the "Windows Server Update Services" role it would fail almost immediately with the following error.

"The update could not be found. Either the update is not applicable to this computer or the update no longer exists. Verify that the update still exists and is applicable to this computer from your WSUS server or Windows Update."

Error Updating Dell Laptop BIOS

Most of our Laptops are Dell Latitude's. As they come in for repair, we like to keep them up to date with the latest BIOS version. Most of the time this is a nice, smooth process.

• Download from Dell
• Login as Administrator on the Laptop
• Run the BIOS Update
• The Laptop reboots and updates
• Job Done

However this morning on a couple of laptops that we had installed Windows 7 on: (I later found that although this is an OS issue, it is NOT specific to Windows 7) we got the following error.