I have been installing a number of hotfixes for Windows 7 using MSU files and the wusa.exe utility included in Windows. I thought it would be a good idea to generate separate log files for each update as it was installed since wusa.exe now supports this option using /log:<file name>. However, the log files created do not seem to be regular text files or any other log file format that I immediately recognize. When opened in Notepad or Wordpad you can see that they contain a lot of additional binary data which can't be read by a regular text viewer. Does anyone know what format these log files are in? What tool should you use to read them?

Does anyone know what format these log files are in? What tool should you use to read them? You have to read them with the EventViewer."A programmer is just a tool which converts caffeine into code" CLIP- Stellvertreter http://www.winvistaside.de/

Thank you. I was on the verge of trying to open them with Event Viewer earlier but for some reason I didn't.

Did the event viewer work for you? Were you on W7 64-bit?ITForever

Yes, I managed to open the log files in Event Viewer. I think I only tried opening the log files on Windows 7 32-bit although I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work equally well on 64-bit. However I decided not to generate any log files as part of the deployment as it seems a bit cumbersome to use event log files for this purpose.