Windows 10 says my device is up to date, but it doesn't have this month's security update

This scenario is a bit different than the one described here. I'm running the latest feature update of windows, Windows 10 1709. In December, I had to manually install the Fall Creators Update in-place.

Starting in January 2018, the device falsely reported it was up to date several days after a security KB was rolled out. I had to resort to manually installing and downloading the January 2018 security update.

Now the February 2018 security update is out, and this machine again claims it is up to date but is not.

I've tried everything here (save clean install) to no avail. I've run Get-WindowsUpdateLog in powershell, and for some reason the update service really is not seeing any relevant security updates. (I've grabbed the ID of the relevant February 2018 update, KB4074588 with ID 29A306E7-C732-4FF8-A939-B1CD9FEEF0D6.1, and that update is nowhere to be found in the log.)

Any thoughts or suggestions before I just proceed with a new windows install?

Answer

One of the main issues with the January updates are that they require an updated anti-virus to update a specific registry value. Once that is done, then Windows will start seeing updates again.

If you do not have an anti-virus that will do this, or you have Windows Defender disabled, you can manually add the registry value.

Microsoft has released this advisory.

You can check if this is the case pretty easily.

1. Click on start


2. Type in regedit and hit enter
   Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\QualityCompat


3. If cadca5fe-87d3-4b96-b7fb-a231484277cc exists and is set to 0x00000000 you should be getting the updates.

If not, you can create the entry if you wish.