Windows Update falsely claims that the exclude drivers policy is set

group-policywindows 10windows update

Update: issue appears fixed, raises more questions than it answers

Goodness gracious, so I just tried to simply enable the policy and then disabling it again (the good old turning it off and on again), and of course it's fixed now… Still doesn't make sense though because of the complete reset of all policies to factory defaults before, that didn't help (I rebooted several times in the mean time as well). Windows has mysterious ways I guess.

Although this doesn't comfort me at all. Why did Windows Update see the wrong/phantom policy setting before? Are (group) policy settings even reliable? Is Windows reliable for that matter…

Windows Update is claiming that the policy to exclude driver updates has been set, which the screen shot below proves is not the case:

Windows Policies

What could be the cause of this?

Windows specifications & Environment

Edition:    Windows 10 Pro  
Version:    1809  
OS build:   17763.437

The computer is running in a home environment (standalone).

What I've tried so far

  • Reset all group policies to factory defaults:
RD /S /Q "%windir%\System32\GroupPolicyUsers"
RD /S /Q "%windir%\System32\GroupPolicy"
gpupdate /force
  • Checked the state of the ExcludeWUDrivers registry entry (located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UpdatePolicy\PolicyState): 0

Best Answer

I had the same issue. I was able to get the problem to go away by enabling the "Do not include drivers with Windows Update" policy, and then setting it back to "Not Configured".

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