>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?

Maybe it's some other product trying to update itself e.g. Symantec sometimes installs LiveUpdate with some of its products, which periodically "phone home" and try to update. You could check installed programs in Control Panel...Programs and Features to see if any automatic update programs or services are installed. Then look in Services to see if any are automatic updaters, and disable those not required.

If that doesn't help you could go into Task Scheduler and see if any scheduled tasks ran near the time the error was logged. That might tell you what's going on. Unfortunately I don't know of any way to search Scheduled Tasks by time a task was run, the few times I've had to do this I've done it manually which is a PITA.