Error encountered during install of December 2008 Cumulative updates

UPDATE:

This has been resolved by the product team with an updated build. 

Problem:

I installed the December updates as mentioned here SharePoint Team Blog Post and thought everything would just be as smooth as silk but that expectation was a little off.  The configuration failed with very little information. 

Since i’ve seen configuration fail a few times at clients i decided to expand my options by using the command line options on msdn 

using this command produced an upgrade.log file in the trace logs directory

psconfig.exe -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b –force

The upgrade log produced this error 

[SPSearchDatabase Name=WSS_Search_DBNAME Parent=SPDatabaseServiceInstance Name=OfficeServers] failed.
[SPManager] [ERROR] [12/18/2008 9:48:22 AM]: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
[SPManager] [ERROR] [12/18/2008 9:48:22 AM]:    at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPSearchDatabaseAction.GetSearchContextSearchSqlStringValue(String stringName)
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SearchQFE23318DatabaseAction.Upgrade()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Upgrade.SPActionSequence.Upgrade()

From this i guessed that it couldn’t upgrade the WSS Search DB which can easily be deleted and recreated. So i turned off the WSS Search Service and upgrade worked fine.  

Solution:

Turn off WSS Search in Central Admin and Upgrade then turn back on.