Once more I find that one of my Windows 2000 boxen has decided it no longer likes Windows Update Service and is spewing the following error into the application eventlog every 10 minutes.

Event Source: ESENT
Event ID: 427
Description: wuaueng.dll (1588) The database engine could not access the file called C:\WINNT\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs\edb.log.

The fix is pretty straight forward. Simply stop the ‘Automatic Update’ service on the affected machine, delete the %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore\Logs\edb.log file, then restart the service. The log file will be recreated the next time Automatic Updates checks in with the WSUS server and the eventlog error will be gone.