Good afternoon. I found an interesting solution I wanted to share. I needed to collect the Windowsupdate.log file on a Windows 2016 server today. To do this I needed to run the PowerShell command Get-WindowsUpdateLog. The file is no longer continuously created as with previous Windows versions. This is all well and good, if the command worked 100% of the time. There have been some instances though where I ran that command and just get a file filled with GUIDs. See the example below.
1600/12/31 18:00:00.0000000 824 1056 Unknown( 10): GUID=638e22b1-a858-3f40-8a43-af2c2ff651a4 (No Format Information found).
1600/12/31 18:00:00.0000000 824 1056 Unknown( 11): GUID=bce7cceb-de62-3b09-7f4f-c69b1344a134 (No Format Information found).
1600/12/31 18:00:00.0000000 824 1056 Unknown( 11): GUID=638e22b1-a858-3f40-8a43-af2c2ff651a4 (No Format Information found).
1600/12/31 18:00:00.0000000 824 1056 Unknown( 50): GUID=6ffec797-f4d0-3bda-288a-dbf55dc91e0b (No Format Information found).
1600/12/31 18:00:00.0000000 824 1056 Unknown( 12): GUID=00497b4f-20f7-3ec8-96ab-8a593aa9824d (No Format Information found).
I have always wondered why this happened. I finally discovered the answer today. When I ran the PowerShell command I kept getting a popup about website security. I checked the box to not ask again and clicked OK. I then received a file full of nothing useful. I had a hunch that the command needed to grab information from the Internet to decode the GUIDs. Perhaps IE ESC (Internet Explorer Enhanced Security) was causing an issue with that process. I disabled IE ESC and re-ran Get-WindowsUpdateLog. Sure enough the file was created correctly.
So now you know. If you get a Windowsupdate.log file full of GUIDs there are two items to check. Verify the server has Internet connectivity and that IE ESC is turned off.
I hope you found this article informative. If you have anything to suggest or add to the content, please leave it in the comments below.
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