I have a handful of machines that show they are missing patches going back months. 

A lot of these machines have missing patches listed as Unknown Error. Code : -2145124329.

According to the hexadecimal translation, 2145124329 is equal to 0x80240017  (not applicable to your server/PC).

I have manually tried installing these patches, yet they all say Not Applicable to your System. So if this is the casse, why doesn't Desktop Central remove this paticular patches from a machine as being missing? Especially since some of these patches go back months, yet the machine has installed newer patches.