Windows Update – Some Settings Are Managed By Your System Administrator

I had a problem recently on one of our client’s servers – I was trying to get them up to date but I couldn’t even check for updates.  The Windows Update control panel also presented me with this lovely message:

…Some settings are managed by your system administrator

The problem is – I am the administrator!

As this was a migrated domain server, I suspected hereditary group policies in on the system but nothing was in place.  Registry settings were checked, and removed, SoftwareDistribution folders removed all to no avail.

This issue turned out to be a ‘user setting’.  Found in this post there was a local users registry key “NoWindowsUpdate” set to 1.  Changing this value to 0 (no restarts required) and opening the Windows Update control panel again fixed it!

The registry key in question can be found in:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Change the NoWindowsUpdate REG_DWORD from 1 to 0.

…Thanks user162193, whoever you are!