Patching Always Fails on One WS Type

Question

Since I've implemented Patch Management in my organization I've cycled through several different workstation types, but recently I'm having trouble with this past year's computer model in that patching always fails.
What is happening is that I have narrowed the patching down to doing the individual machines (HP dc7900). I'll select the patches I want to push go through the wizard using default settings and force the restart. The deployment process will go successfully but the install/launches will fail.
In the reporting I'll get a remediate.exe failure with a Windows error: Unknown error (0xffffffff) on the bundle package. On the workstation I'll get notification messages for every patch in the bundle. Overall ZCM status reporting says that the package was successfully deployed but in actuality absolutely zero updates are applied.
This happens the same for every dc7900 in our building which were set up using the same process as dc5700 and two generations of dc5800 workstations that all patch successfully. Has anyone run into a similar situation? Thanks!

Answer 1

We make a new "source image" for each computer model that we have so different base images for the 5700, 5800 and 7900. All of our images are made with the same XP SP3 volume license and network deployed apps installed. The 57/5800 systems had Windows Updates enabled as "download and let me choose when to install" but with the 7900 we thought that we would be able to use Patch Management to deploy updates so on the image the updates were turned off, but we have since manually turned them back on to automatic to make sure they keep updating.
I did recently find out that this behavior also follows application bundles on these systems now. I usually deploy bundles as dynamic administrator but have read in another thread that deploying as system may cause less hassles but I haven't had a chance to test this yet.