Q. I'm experiencing problems with BITS transfers on my system, is there any tool to see the state of BITS from the command line?

A. Microsoft provides the BITSADMIN command line utility that lists all BITS transfers for all users using the /list /allusers switches, as shown below.

C:>bitsadmin /list /allusers

 BITSADMIN version 3.0 \[ 7.5.7601 \]
 BITS administration utility.
 (C) Copyright 2000-2006 Microsoft Corp.

 BITSAdmin is deprecated and is not guaranteed to be available in future versions
 of Windows.
 Administrative tools for the BITS service are now provided by BITS PowerShell cm
 dlets.

 \{D7BAF9CE-5ED2-4AF3-8B58-BEF9332BACBD\} 'WU Client Download' SUSPENDED 0 / 1 0 /
 26987
 \{DDD96793-B763-4980-9969-A2BEA2B85603\} 'WU Client Download' SUSPENDED 0 / 1 0 /
 1008579
 \{56EE8411-B354-4A46-AB65-9F84EAEF9451\} 'WU Client Download' SUSPENDED 0 / 1 0 /
 4538
 Listed 3 job(s).

You can get more detail about each job by passing the GUID. For example,

C:>bitsadmin /listfiles \{D7BAF9CE-5ED2-4AF3-8B58-BEF9332BACBD\}

 BITSADMIN version 3.0 \[ 7.5.7601 \]
 BITS administration utility.
 (C) Copyright 2000-2006 Microsoft Corp.

 BITSAdmin is deprecated and is not guaranteed to be available in future versions
 of Windows.
 Administrative tools for the BITS service are now provided by BITS PowerShell cm
 dlets.

 0 / 26987 WORKING http://au.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/softwar
 e/secu/2010/05/windows6.1-kb980218-x64_5c07ad93437ff5eeac46a6357fa11833fd98613a.
 psf -> C:WindowsSoftwareDistributionDownload516e2cc9fe7a890636ed61fe5d349711
 5c07ad93437ff5eeac46a6357fa11833fd98613a-1
 Ranges:
 offset 33454, length 426
 offset 36025, length 355
 offset 38596, length 377
 offset 39730, length 509
 offset 40810, length 578
 offset 41992, length 605
 offset 43205, length 623
 offset 175871, length 10536
 offset 364597, length 12978
 Listed 1 file(s).

Using this tool gives a good insight into the BITS traffic and where problems may be occurring.