After updating a customer laptop to XP SP2, doing a windows update generated a 80072EE2 error message.

A quick search showed that it can be caused by a firewall.

Thats odd. The PC had no firewall before I installed SP2, so the “pristine” XP firewall should be fine.

But since I’ve seen the XP firewall occasionally stop working correctly, I decide to reset it (control panel -> windows firewall -> advanced -> restore defaults).

And thats all that was needed to fix the 0x80072ee2 error 🙂