WSUS Fun!

I recently setup WSUS 3 Beta to update our servers.
A few servers have a tendency to stop checking in and fail
to recieve any more updates. Two troublesome ones were
Windows 2003 SP1 and the errors I found in the windows update log ( c:\windows\windowsupdate.log ) were initially
Failed to initialize datastore, error = 0xC80003F3 .

Found an article that suggested stopping the automatic updates service and deleting c:\windows\softwaredistribution . This still didn't fix the issue since we then started recieving 0x8024400a and 0x8007000e.

This thread was very helpful:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windows.server.update_services/browse_thread/thread/979ea50fc3edce66/357307bc73ea092f%23357307bc73ea092f

and referenced
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905422
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927891

It came down to installing Windows 2003 sp2 on the WSUS server and on the servers that were having the connection issues. I had to reboot everything after the sp install so it may take awhile to see if the issue is actually resolved since a reboot tended to temporarily fix the problem before anyway.

More on this later if the problem isn't resolved.