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Just a couple of notes: I, too, had a great experience dealing with HCS. My machine was unable to see the February updates, and, indeed, installed and then backed out KB4537820. I discovered that both Windows 7 and the ESU “License Statuses” MUST be “Licensed” for updates to work. I had ‘activated’ the wrong ID– the one for the OS, and not the one for the ESU key.

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Elly

Followup: I checked Microsoft Update today (Sunday) and found that KB-4530734, 2019-12 Security Monthly Quarterly Roll-up, had failed to install. I tried installing it from MS Update, and it installed just fine this time. I have turned MS Update back on, and put the new machine purchase (Dell apparently does not support Win 10 on my old XPS-720x laptop).

Yesterday (Tuesday evening) I tried to install yesterday’s patches on my pretty-much vanilla 8 year old Dell XPS laptop. The update tried to install, but just hung. After what I considered enough time for something to happen, I did the unthinkable: I powered off the machine and rebooted it in safe mode. Windows then reverted the changes (I was surprised, to say the least). I then rebooted and the machine booted normally, but then tried to install an update, which hung again. I repeated the power off, boot to safe mode procedure, but this time I turned Microsoft Update b****y off. It will remain  turned off until Woody and Ms. Susan sound the ‘all clear’. The laptop is now running just fine without whatever updates MS wanted me to have. Other than the “missing updates preventing any Updates” riot a few years ago, I have never had any problems with Microsoft Update, believing that the lack of any software other than MS Office would keep me safe. Oh, well. Perhaps this is Microsoft’s subtle hint that I should buy a shiny new Windows 10 machine… 🙂

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RTEsysadmin

My thoughts exactly. Thanks for the help!

I have finally narrowed the field down to a single culprit: the Garmin Core Update Service. I verified this by running a number of times, for several hours each time with the Garmin service disabled, and then by enabling the service, only to have the symptoms appear after a couple of hours.

The executable, Garmin.Cartography.MapUpdate.CoreService.exe, if this is the correct one, is 186,200 bytes and is dated 20-Mar-2013.

Actually, I keep my 11 year old Gateway XP desktop around because HP did not see fit to update their device drivers for my Scanjet 2200c or my LaserJet 1000 printer. My Windows 7 and Linux Mint boxes share the scanner and the printer over my home network. Only if these devices die before I do 🙂 shall I’ll consider ditching the XP box…

I have taken your suggestion to disable half my non-Microsoft Start-up Services. Two revelations: 1. The problem, as far as I can tell, has disappeared. I have not had time to continue the binary search for the culprit yet, but hopefully over the Holiday I’ll get time. 2. My computer works just fine, thank you, without half them. 🙂

[The Services disabled are two Adobe updaters, a number of Bluetooth Services (non of which I use), a few audio services, a Dell Digital Delivery Service (whatever that it), a Garmin GPS updater, and an Intuit updater.]

Got the problem to reoccur. I had an Administrator-level DOS command box, task manager, and Outlook (2010) running at the time. I found that while I could kill explorer, it would not start, either from taskmgr or the DOS box. It would, however, appear among the list of running processes in taskmgr. I killed them off, so as not to have more than one ‘running’. I also found, to my surprise, that I could launch command-line programs that do not use the windowing system from the DOS Box. I found I could minimize the two remaining applications (I killed Outlook), and restore them. Bizarrely, the three gadgets I run were fine (CPU meter, Network meter, Day Calendar, and current weather). (I have tried killing the gadgets, but the problem still reoccurred.) I tried killing off a process at a time, but could not find the culprit, before I inadvertently killed taskmgr, which ended the experiment, since I could no longer kill off tasks.

I am hazarding a guess that there is something amiss with the windowing code, as opposed to the actual OS (I still consider them separate).

I note that there are two sizes of explorer.exe on my system. In the windows directory, date 12/20/2011, size 2,871,808; and in windowsSystem32, date 11/20/2010, size 2,616,320. Wonder which is the ‘correct’ one. I did try to execute both from the DOS box after the problem struck, sans success…

Results of the scan:

C:Windowssystem32>sfc /scannow

Beginning system scan. This process will take some time.

Beginning verification phase of system scan.
Verification 100% complete.

Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations.