Wow so here you go! I went about 3-4 hours, bringing up Windows Update and it was fine each time. On a hunch, I did a restart - brought it up, and look - it's now in Pause, and the values are added to the Registry. This is so bizarre, how is this happening?
What is even more bizarre are the Pause.......UpdatesStartTime values which have yesterday's date: 2020-05-14T00:00Z.
That suggests the problem may have nothing to do with your windows update settings and lies elsewhere. Do you have any 3rd-party software (an AV perhaps) that could be 'protecting' your registry by restoring it to an earlier date at restart?
There is an outside possibility that you have some malware that's reverting the registry at restart to block its removal and this setting happens to be one of the ones it restores. If so, then you must have had updates paused when you caught it.
Adding to what Bree just posed, did you recently uninstall an app.? When I get one of these oddball occurrences, I will run the four malware engines I have on our system (Norton 360, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, and MSERT) just to make sure something didn’t sneak in from somewhere.
I actually don't have an AV installed, as this is a VM I pretty much exclusively use for a couple of Windows-based work apps on my Mac. I installed the free version of Malwarebytes, and it did a scan finding only 1 issue - something in the registry, Pup.Optional.InstallCore. I quarantined it, restarted, and the Pause was back. I can't think of anything specific I uninstalled, I know in the last week I went through the App list and just uninstalled some of the Windows junk that comes installed like the Xbox stuff, Groove etc., that it will let me uninstall (some things were grayed out). I did also this week install the new Chromium-based Edge as well.
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I actually don't have an AV installed, as this is a VM I pretty much exclusively use for a couple of Windows-based work apps on my Mac. I installed the free version of Malwarebytes, and it did a scan finding only 1 issue - something in the registry, Pup.Optional.InstallCore. I quarantined it, restarted, and the Pause was back. I can't think of anything specific I uninstalled, I know in the last week I went through the App list and just uninstalled some of the Windows junk that comes installed like the Xbox stuff, Groove etc., that it will let me uninstall (some things were grayed out). I did also this week install the new Chromium-based Edge as well.
I next uninstalled some other unnecessary apps - iCloud for Windows, disabled Cortana on Startup, with no change - both times it rebooted with Pause on.
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Well this morning I checked, and Update was correct, turned on - from all last night. As a test, I restarted, and checked, and it was back on Pause. So restarting seems to cause it to revert to pause.
So I just tried this test - with it working properly off Pause, I went into Advanced options, and I set it for 1 day - to Pause until tomorrow. I checked the reg file, and sure enough the new entries were added, start today, end tomorrow, for Feature and Quality updates. I closed regedit, restarted, and opened regedit - it now shows start yesterday, end May 23 for both types of Updates! So it's not just replacing with some static data, it's changing what inputs in there - at least compared to yesterday.
Could this be a side effect of running it as a VM?
this is a VM I pretty much exclusively use for a couple of Windows-based work apps on my Mac...
The VM when restarted checks its system time against that of the machine it's running on. In the case of a VM the 'machine' time is that of the host OS, not the real hardware clock. I have heard of 'odd' things happening when the host OS and the VM had a mismatch in time zone or daylight saving settings and the internet time that the VM sees.
Nothing in that area has changed, and it's been quite awhile since DST started. Good suggestion though, I am running out of ideas, at this point it seems to insist on leaving it Paused till May 23. I am going to not touch it unless some other suggestions come in, which I am glad to try! Then I'll see what happens on May 23. Oh boy, like waiting for my birthday! ��
Here's a wild thought... if restarting seems to be enabling the pause feature, why not test with a clean boot after disabling pause? Then you might identify if a third-party app is part of this issue or not.
Would any of this activity be captured in the Event Viewer?
I thought I tried that the other day, do you mean do a Safe Boot? When I did that, it would not let me run Windows update. I even tried a Safe Boot with networking, there must be something it needed that was not running.
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