>I had an event viewer log for MsiInstaller. The message was "Failed to connect to server." What is irritating me is that the specific server is set to not check for Windows Updates. This was triggered automatically. No one was on the server. Can this be explained?

Now if you had a real firewall, which wouldn't blindly trust anything labeled as system call, you could catch this. This is what I got in 2009, when I still had a 32-bit Windows and the old Sygate firewall (before it was bought and castrated into Zonealarm).