Easy To Read Windows Update Log

Have you ever had a Windows Update run on your computer, and soon after your favorite application starts acting funny, or just plain freezes entirely? If you run Windows I can just about guarantee this has happened to you.

A quick solution to this is to remove the patches/updates Windows just dropped on you. To find which updates were just installed on your windows machine you can look in the Windows update log located at %windir%\Windowsupdate.log and try to decipher WTF it means, or you can use this script and generate an easy-to-read one:

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dir c:\windows\*.log /o:d | findstr /i /r /c:q......\.log /c:kb......\.log /c:q......uninst\.log /c:kb......uninst\.log > c:\TimeLine.log
pause

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Just copy the text between the dashed lines above into a new notepad file and save it as "UpdateLog.bat" somewhere on your machine. Then double-click the file to run it, and viola! - you'll have an easy to read log located at c:\timeline.log containing all the information you'll need to find and kill the windows update that is messing with your application.

The file will have the date & time the update was installed, and the name of the update.  Just find the newest ones that were installed (it will be ordered oldest to newest and top to bottom), open up Add/Remove Programs, and uninstall the offending "patch" with the matching kb number.

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