Windows Update – Service not running or Windows System apps appear as from unknown publisher

There are two symptoms to the same problem in Microsoft Windows:

  1. Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer
  2. When you Run As Administrator mmc.exe, notepad.exe, regedit.exe and any other program, you get — Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?

These errors started to appear after one of the Intel RAID 1 (Intel ICH8R/ICH10R SATA RAID controller) drives have failed, and was replaced with the new drive. The RAID rebuilt was successful, however the above symptoms have appeared.

Where is the problem?

Windows Cryptographic Services. The service have two folders under Windows/System32 directory:
C:\Windows\System32\catroot
and
C:\Windows\System32\catroot2

One of them have the log file – edb.log, that was full of the error messages.

CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: JetInit Corruption
CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: catadnew.cpp at line #1900 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: catadnew.cpp at line #901 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: JetInit Corruption
CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: catadnew.cpp at line #1921 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:01 AM 05/16/2016: catadnew.cpp at line #911 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: JetInit Corruption
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #755 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #969 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #6724 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #6918 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #7075 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #3454 encountered JET error -583
CatalogDB: 18:50:02 AM 05/16/2016: catdbsvc.cpp at line #2702 encountered JET error -583

Also in the GUID-named subfolders there are two database files called “catdb”.
C:\Windows\System32\catroot2\{127D0A1D-4EF2-11D1-8608-00C04FC295EE}\catdb
and
C:\Windows\System32\catroot2\{F750E6C3-38EE-11D1-85E5-00C04FC295EE}\catdb

They both were missing. Folders were empty… And do not try to copy them from another PC. It would not work. Windows will automatically delete them after Cryptographic Service is started.

Where is the solution?

Update your RAID driver! Yes simple as that, update driver (to at least version: 11.7.0.1013 from 12/3/2012), and these files are regenerated automatically. On modern Intel i7 CPU it took about 1 hour.

P.S. I believe that this applies not only to Windows 7, but also to Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.
P.S.S. Running Microsoft Windows Resource Checker (SFC.exe) does not do anything useful in this case.