This morning the Windows 8 Store app said it had 15 updates to process and during the update process a number of application updates sat around in the “Pending” state then failed (including Mail and Video) with the message “This application wasn’t installed – view details“.

Clicking the “view details” link as prompted, next to each failing update, showed the following message “Something happened and this app couldn’t be installed. Please try again. Error code: 0x8024001e” with the options “Try again” and “Cancel install“. Clicking “Try again” lead to the same error message.

Most advice on the blog and forums seem to recommend clean-booting the system then uninstalling and re-installing the apps in question but this should not be needed for the apps that come bundled with Windows 8. The Event Log reports “Installation Failure: Windows failed to install the following update with error 0x8024200D” which indicates there are two issues affecting Windows 8 updates from the Windows store.

One workaround that appears to be working for some (and only do this if you are happy fiddling around behind the scenes) is to stop the Windows update service, rename the SoftwareDistribution folder, then restart the Windows update service (which downloads a new SoftwareDistribution folder. The commands for this are:

• Windows and X key then select Command Prompt (Admin)
• net stop wuauserv
• cd\windows
• rename SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.bck
• net start wuauserv