I recently ran into this problem on an XP machine that was just cleaned of
viruses. The solution was searching the registry for the word BITS. I found
two places in which the word %SystemRoot% had been changed to %fystemRoot%.
This was probably changes by some malware to prevent BITS from starting.
Changing it back fixed the issue.

"In Excelsius Dago" wrote:

> The error code that I get for updates is 0x80246008. On looking for
> how to approach this problem, I went to services.msg and opened up the
> Background Intelligent transfer services dialog. System status showed
> "stopped." I tried to start, and was told, "Could not start the
> Background Intelligent Transfer Service service on Local Computer.
> Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified." The path was C:
> \WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs. Is this correct, and if so,
> what file needs to be located and how to I get it, I wonder.
>