In reply to a post by GeoffB:

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

Ah, I think that could have been my problem. I've not installed SP1 yet. I was a bit wary of it, but I guess I should.

In reply to a post by Malwaremike:

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.

Problem seemed to resolve itself (see my post up thread) but it can't be SP1 in my case as I haven't installed it yet. I thought maybe NOT having installed SP1 was the problem, but maybe it was just a dodgy update.

SP1 was one of the four updates which would not auto-install and gave problems of hanging etc. for five minutes, then the computer said Unable to install and self-restored. When I manually selected one by one they installed and worked OK. Sorry being non-tech I can't be more precise.

Auto-update has always worked fine both with W7 since early last year and with XP from 2003 to date. Glad to hear it's sorted, who said that computers save time ?

In reply to a post by cblymie:

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!

Sure it is

hah ok an update.

On this pc not quite so smooth, no idea which update it was but I noticed on this pc it said stae 1 of 2, and then stage 2 of 2 after the reboot (other pc didnt do this).

This pc got stuck on stage 2 of 2 for an hour sitting idle, I then pressed ctrl-alt-delete which gave me the login prompt and after I logged in it said all updates done fine.

had he same on my pc. Had to start windows update manually and then hay presto. I assume there will be a lessons learned session in side Microsoft on this

Thank you! Hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del got me to a login prompt as well after staring at the same screen for two and half hours. D'oh! Probably could have done that hours ago.