saltface's questions

On a single computer, it's simple enough to filter which updates Microsoft deems important by running a PS script such as the following:

$session = New-Object -ComObject Microsoft.Update.Session
$searcher = $session.CreateUpdateSearcher()
$result = $searcher.Search("IsInstalled=0 and Type='Software' and IsHidden=0")
$requiredupdates = $result.Updates |? AutoSelectOnWebSites -eq $true

However, this information is not given when reviewing updates for release through our patch management software. I could run the above script against a representative machine but it would exclude patches that wouldn't be listed until after a reboot.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/1234567 will usually report if automatic updating will apply a patch, but this is not always true.

Is there another method (preferably programmatic) to retrieve this information?

I changed the user under which the WinRM service runs on one of my DCs. I'm trying to change it back to Network Service but as a DC doesn't have local accounts available, the only location I can search for accounts is my domain.

When running a query such as

Get-ADUser -Filter * | select DistinguishedName, Enabled

the Enabled column has a lot of null values (I was expecting true or false only). Why is this?

Is there a better command to get the enabled/disabled status of user accounts?

This is on a 2008R2 domain.

Four or five users (out of 30-35 users) at one of our office locations are having odd issues with Outlook 2010 and 2013 losing the connection to Office 365: Occasionally, when sending an email, the progress bar goes almost all the way to completed but then stays there.
If I open "Connection Status," the connections are all established but the Req/Fail counter doesn't increase. But if I open the connection monitor on my firewall, I can see TCP traffic to the Microsoft server slowly trickle across.
Cancelling the server request immediately fixes the issue (as will restarting Outlook) but only for that Send/Receive.
I'm using Cisco switches with a SonicWall TZ205 firewall. I was hoping the issue was caused by our firewall killing inactive RPC tunnels, but upping the TCP timeout to two hours has had no effect.
Microsoft hasn't been any help and they've stopped returning our phone calls.
If it is a local network issue, what would I even look for?

I'm running a PowerShell script that posts data to an internal webserver over HTTPS. The SSL certificate is not valid. I'm using

[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = {$true}

to accept the certificate and it works when the script is ran from the command line but I get the error

You must write ContentLength bytes to the request stream before calling [Begin]GetResponse.

when ran as a scheduled task. The exact command is

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://host/login.cgi' -Method POST -Body 'username&password' -UseBasicParsing

I'm getting this error when I try to run Get/New-InboxRule on a specific mailbox on Exchange 2010 SP2:

A participant ENTRYID is malformed and cannot be read.
    + CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (0:Int32) [Get-InboxRule], CorruptDataException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : 129AF165,Microsoft.Exchange.Management.RecipientTasks.GetInboxRule

Trying to create the rule in OWA gets the same result.