Windows 7 latest updates problem

Has anyone else encountered problems with the latest Windows 7 automatic updates (the ones it does every so often before you switch off your computer)?

Usually it all goes smoothly, but this morning when I switched my laptop on and it seemed to take an inordinately long period of time to boot, then came up with a 'failure to login, restarting' message (or similar). It tried to restart itself but just hung, so I forced a restart in safe mode, which also took ages - eventually THAT restarted itself, and on the reboot it said that an update had failed and it was reverting to before the update.

I've heard from another Win7 user that they had similar problems, is this a bad update?

I can see I've got the Windows Update exclamation mark logo on the shutdown button, which I guess means it'll try again next time I switch the machine off.

i had this problem this morning, shut down ok but took 10 mins to log back in and even then it said that the update had failed.

I solved the problem by starting the install before i shut down, when it restarted it updated within 2 mins.

ive had this prob b4 and was told on a microsoft forum it was because one update changed something but couldnt complete until the reboot and another update wanted to try to update the same file so they where fighting until the core program decided it had waited long enough and so cancelled them both

Cheers for the reply, I might try that (running the update before I shut down the machine) and see if it works.

I'm running vista on main computer and 7 on a laptop. It did update late last night no problems but will turn it on now to see if their has been any further overnight. Will let you know the result.

Yes currently updating but seems suspended at 0%. Will see how long it takes to complete.

Update completed fine within a few minutes. As their was an update late last night and obviously one this morning, Anons explanation could be correct and your system is trying to install both update before shutting down?

Cheers Speedchaser! Could be. I think I'll try installing the update manually before I shut the machine down tonight. Daren't muck about with it now, as I'm short on time and if it stuffs the machine up I've no time to sit around correcting it.

hae had the same 2 times now. What I have done is an update in control panel and that has worked

The latest update I had (W7 Home) took a long time to finish on restart and the progress counter stayed at 0% throughout.

On restart I notiiced there was immediately another update, so shutdown again and let it do it's "thang"! This time the re-start was quicker, the progress counter operated as expected and all is well.

However, in the past I have had the "Update Failed... Restarting.... Update Failed... Restarting..." cycle. I found that by starting in Safe Mode and Restoring my machine to a time prior to the update, allowed my machine to start as normal.

I then de-selected the latest batch of updates from Windows Update and reselected them one at a time, until I found the problematical one and left that de-selected - if you see what I mean...

I haven't had any issues since so guess MS have got their act back together and resolved whatever was causing the issue - probably the cough as they wrote a cheque for £8Bn for Skype!!

It seems that the safe mode restart sorted it - I shut it down as usual last night, just to see if it would be OK without manually installing the updates, and though it took an age to install the two remaining updates, it rebooted OK this morning.

I'll know not to panic if it does something similar in future...