Duplicate Patch My PC Category Listed in Software Update Point Products Tab

Recently, we have seen an increase in customers having an issue where duplicate Patch My PC categories will appear in the software update point products tab.

Determine if You are Affected

The most common scenario that leads to us checking for duplicate Patch My PC categories is customers opening a support case mentioning newly published updates aren’t appearing in the All Software Updates node in Configuration Manager. If you are affected by this issue, you should see multiple Patch My PC categories listed in the Software Update Point properties.

In the ConfigMgr console, navigate to Administration > Site Configuration > Sites > Configure Site Components > Software Update Point. In the Products tab, check if there are multiple Patch My PC categories as shown below:

Root Cause of Duplicate Product Categories

The duplicate categories are caused by a change in WSUS on Server 2019, where it uses SHA2 instead of SHA1 to compute a unique category hash for a vendor category.

Before Server 2019, WSUS would use SHA1 to compute a unique hash for a vendor category in the database. Unfortunately, this causes a duplicate category for any updates published after a Server 2019 in-place upgrade.

If you connect the SUSDB with SQL Server Management Studio and run:

exec spGetTopLevelCategories

You can see the duplicate categories created

Important: The duplicate category is not specific to Patch My PC updates. This WSUS bug affects any published third-party category. For example, in the example below, you can see a duplicate Dell category when Dell drivers were published after the OS upgrade

Resolution for Duplicate Patch My PC Categories

The primary issue that causes customer problems is the new company category in the Software Update Point Products tab has not been enabled. By not having it enabled, any newly published updates after the OS upgrade don’t sync into ConfigMgr.

The quickest and easiest fix is to simply enable the second Patch My PC category in the Software Update Point Products tab

Once the product is enabled and you completed a software update point sync in ConfigMgr, the new updates should appear in the All Software Updates as normal.

Important: If you use an Automatic Deployment Rules that use Vendor or Product in the Software Update criteria, you will need to modify the search criteria.

In the Software Update tab of your automatic deployment rule, you will need to enable both Patch My PC Vendors. Based on our experience, although it appears both Vendor categories may be enabled when clicking the Vendor that is not the case unless the ADR Vendor shows “Patch My PC” OR “Patch My PC” in the search criteria.

To enable both vendors, you can uncheck one of the Patch My PC vendors then recheck it again and the criteria should then list both vendors. This change will allow your ADR to search updates published before the WSUS OS upgrade and after.