I had no end of trouble with Automatic Updates. I switched to manually installing through Control Panel>Windows Update (Win7 Home Premium) and have had no trouble since. I've also read that people who haven't yet installed Win7 SP1 are having hassle updating.

In reply to a post by GeoffB:

I've also read that people who haven't yet installed Win7 SP1 are having hassle updating.

No problems here updating without sp1 installed...

Glad it worked out. It's a pain when a computers not running smoothly.

I think it's the SP1 update causing the problem. Auto updates have been fine last 2 yrs but this one hung in the way described. It seems that the block of four updates caused the problem, load them manually one at a time and I got there eventually with plenty of restarts and configuring between each one. At least restarts are much faster than XP or Vista.

Being non-techie I had to work out manual update, go to control panel -- type update in search box top right -- update status is displayed -- select update history from list on left and you get a list of all updates and whether they have installed or not. Hope this helps.

I do updates manually (and have no problems) but what you can always do is allow approx 10 days from the wednesday (UK time) when they are released, giving sufficient time for them to be pulled if faulty.

I've seen that issue once on a Windows Vista machine and that was when I removed power from a machine in the middle of it updating, I think it took about 20 minutes to sort itsself out and it did require a restart more than once.

For the record, I read a recommendation somewhere that it's best to install Service Pack updates (hopefully there aren't too many) independently of all other updates. I seem to remember that SP1 came with about 10 other updates that month. I installed SP1 first and the others the next day.

always install SP's standalone if possible and using the offline installer (the large file).

Incidently I have a SP1 machine updated in the other room, it did this month's updates fine. I am updating this one today or tommorow.

OMG, letting windows do auto updates is like giving a rocket launcher to a monkey

That is good practice especially on XP but on later operating systems Windows Update will not allow you to install a SP (or any other update) with other updates if they will cause problems. It is incredibly reliable as it has to cater for users who may just switch a computer off at any stage of an update process.

In reply to a post by Tox_Laximus:

OMG, letting windows do auto updates is like giving a rocket launcher to a monkey

Well, it's a pretty efficient monkey, seeing as I've let Windows do automatic updates for the past 10 years, and this is the first time I've ever had a problem!