How to clear XPE SP2 tech preview downloads from the pending download queue

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Hey all,

I received some feedback from a couple of customer who are using the XPEFFI tool to download the XP Embedded SP2 tech preview and are using dial-up connections. They indicated that they discovered the size of the download and cancelled it because of the large size, but that the items remained in the queue and continued to be downloaded by the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) and killing their connection throughput. This is an issue that I have fixed for the RTM version of XPEFFI, but I wanted to provide a set of steps that you can use to remove these download jobs from the queue on your machine in the meantime:

  1. First, download the bitsadmin.exe tool that is part of the Platform SDK. I put a copy at https://astebner.sts.winisp.net/Tools/bitsadmin.exe.txt so that you do not need to download the entire PSDK. Note that you will need to rename the file from bitsadmin.exe.txt to bitsadmin.exe when you download it to your machine
  2. Follow the instructions at https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/bits/bits/bitsadmin_tool.asp to run bitsadmin.exe from a cmd prompt to clear your BITS cache. The easiest option is to run the /Reset switch to clear all jobs from the cache. However, if you have jobs from other locations that you want to keep, you can use the /List switch to get a list of all pending jobs, and then use the /Cancel switch to cancel only the jobs created by XPEFFI. They will all be named with the prefix "XPEFFI-SP2-RC" so they should be easy to find

I apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. Please contact me if you have any issues getting this to work for you.