Florian’s Blog

[Update: I removed the “Beta/RC” note since SP2 is final now] 

For those of you who test Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista, you might have noticed, that Group Policy Preferences still aren’t shipped and must be downloaded and installed seperately. This has been with SP1 too and has management reasons for the team to be more respondive and flexible on changes and feature requests to the CSEs.

Unfortunately, for Service Pack 2, there isn’t a customized MSU update file available at download.microsoft.com and you’ll stick with the SP1-update. For some reason, it throws an error message on installation: “This update does not apply to this system”.

Fortunately, there’s a way to “brute-force” install MSU-updates to a system: http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1505-Generic-way-of-brute-force-installing-a-.MSU-package-in-Vista-or-Server-2008.html

In order to get that working with the Preference-CSEs you’d have to do the following:

expand Windows6.0-KB943729-x64.msu -F:* <location to extract>

start /w %systemroot%\system32\pkgmgr.exe /ip /m:<extraction location>\Windows6.0-KB943729-x64.cab

What that does is simply extract the contents of the MSU file (first step) and afterwards install the extracted cabinet (CAB) file that was contained within the update file. That circumvents the system check. Note that this method might not be supported by Microsoft. You may not get support if things go awry.

Thanks to Jostein who posted his solution on this!