Antivirus programs or third-party firewalls are notorious for being overprotective. They might see the outbound communication of wuauclt.exe as a security threat and "kill" the process, resulting in a crash report. The Best Solutions to Get it Working Again

: On modern systems like Windows 10 and 11, many wuauclt.exe command-line functions (like /detectnow ) have been replaced by the Settings app or USOClient.exe , which can cause confusion if you are trying to trigger updates manually.

Several common issues can cause this process to become unresponsive or trigger a "stopped working" error:

Before proceeding, verify the file location.