I have recently had an issue with WU failing to check automatically for updates (my WU is set to notify only). This occurred following a full disk clean including using the option to clean system files 9something I have done many times in the past). To be certain (so I thought) of correcting the issue I restored back to a system image made on June 6th knowing that WU had operated correctly for several days beyond this point.

The restored image worked as expected and picked up all the early June updates. At some after this I again ran disk cleanup and found myself in the same situation as before in that WU now no longer checks daily for updates.

As an initial attempt to correct this (I didn't want to try anything aggressive at this stage), I simply changed my settings to 'never check for updates' and then reapplied the original 'check and notify' setting. This caused WU to immediately begin a check which has successfully picked up the latest mid June optional updates. Whether WU remains working remains to be seen. I haven't at this point run another clean up.

(I also wondered if there was any setting/registry key etc that can be viewed to give confirmation that WU is running correctly and that a next day update is scheduled)

(no 3rd party system tools are used. This is a 'clean' Windows installation)

This is strange.

You should check the event viewer logs to find out any clue behind this. You might be able to automatically fix some problems by running the Windows Update Troubleshooter

Thanks the reply and links. I've looked in Event Viewer as you suggest and I can't really see anything out of the ordinary (looking in 'system' and also 'application'). I can see the install of the updates, restarts and so on. No errors relating to anything remotely connected to WU.

Having got WU to work by changing the user setting to 'never check' and then changing it back again, I shall wait and see what happens tomorrow. I'll update this thread with further developments. 

Firstly, thanks again for the diagnostics file, I think (hope) we might have success with that. 

Todays update failed, no check occurred. Before running your file I performed an SFC check (which reports unfixed errors) followed by DISM restore health and again another SFC, all with reboots in between. The unfixed files remain... however... I'm not entirely convinced because I believe there is a widely reported SFC issue at the moment with 'false positives' due to a W8.1/10 compatibility update. After all of this I ran your file and that reports,

1/ Service registration missing or corrupt..... fixed.
2/ Windows Update Error 0x80070490......... fixed.
3/ Problems installing recent updates........... fixed.

and resetting of Windows Update data store.

So the position now...

Having played around and looked (and tried many things) I have again gone back to the disk image of June 6th to give a clean starting point. That image is fine and it has picked up all the monthly and mid month updates. I've no doubt that just left alone this image will keep working but at some point I want to run a cleanup. So the plan is to now make a new image as it stands now, and then to continue and run disk cleanup and your file fix. That will give me two scenarios, firstly the cleaned image will be OK (having run the fix), or if not then I will revert to the point we are at now, a fully functional non cleaned image and take things from there for further investigation.

And thanks again.

Further info...

The update reset tool left the system as showing 'Updates installed... never' and 'last check for updates... never'.

I left things like that hoping that an update check would commence at some point, however it seems it has not. We are on a new day and nothing has changed. I have now forced a manual check for updates, whether that will now work as normal and check automatically tomorrow remains to be seen.

Hopefully a final update. This morning and all is well, the normal update check commenced correctly.

At a later date (I'll let things run a while to be sure all is OK) it will be interesting to see if this happens again following a disk clean or whether it was one of these weird 'one offs'.