SCCM 2012 SP1 - DownloadContentFiles() failed with hr=0x80041013

Perhaps the REV site code was used for a temporary test installation of SCCM 2012? Perhaps not. Institutional knowledge doesn't have any record of the REV it and the migration we performed before I was hired.

This hunch was correct. I got a hold of my predecessor and apparently the first and unsuccessful attempt to migrate from SCCM 2007 to SCCM 2010 used the REV site code. How it managed to sit dormant in WMI all this time and why it got "activated" is a complete mystery to me.

I very carefully re-read the solution in this TechNet post which advised deleting the old namespaces and decided to try that. I kind of hesitate to mark this as an answer even though it did resolve this issue, it indicates that I implicitly approve of it, especially since I couldn't get anyone "official" at Microsoft to confirm whether or not this was a safe approach or what the consequences were for doing this. That being said, make sure you have complete backups of your SCCM server or at least a much more intimate knowledge of WMI before proceeding. You could very easily break everything doing this, especially if like me, you're not familiar with WMI and how deeply SCCM leverages it.

I used wbemtest to connect to the root\sms namespace on our SCCM server. From there I used the [Enum_Instances...] button and search for __NAMESPACE as the superclass. I deleted the entry for the REV site code. I then did the same Enum_Instances for the SMS_ProviderLocation as the superclass and deleted the old site code from that namespace. Re-running the Automatic Deployment Rules and reviewing the PatchDownloader.log showed the successful downloading of each Windows Update.

I would greatly appreciate more information about how these namespaces are used by SCCM and exactly how this fixed the issue if anyone has more detailed information.