Configmgr client application stuck at 0% downloading

I’ve been meaning to do a quick blog about this issue for some time now especially as I have witnessed this incredibly frustrating problem at two separate clients during roll-outs, particularly OS deployments that also require updated applications, etc. A Google search will reveal many different ‘fixes’ for this issue, most common of which tends to involve re-installing the ConfigMgr client. Indeed this is an approach I took first time round and usually seemed to work but it isn’t really a fix as such.

In the latest instalment, this approach just didn’t work at all so I needed to find what else was causing the issue. If I left the offending application to time out – this might take several hours btw – I could usually restart it and it would go ahead and download. However this was still unacceptable.

SOLUTION

Turns out the answer, with hindsight, was the same in both instances – too many policies. Essentially in both circumstances, the machines experiencing the issue had a lot of applications and/or task sequences deployed to them. Task sequences in particular usually have many steps and this seems to flood the client causing it to display this ‘stuck at 0%’ behaviour. Try removing the machine from all unnecessary collections, leave for an hour or so for the machine to expunge any of the old deployments and try again.

This still feels like a Microsoft issue to me but until it’s addressed this is the workaround.

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