For a few months now, after replacing hard drives or doing clean installs of Windows Home Premium or Professional SP1 which I install from a deployment server, i have been unable to update windows with any updates at all, I tried using dvd versions to see if it made any difference, It didn’t..
Getting very frustrated i spent hours googling for possible answer, trying different ideas from different forums, none of which worked.
Due to being busy for the past month i finally decided to revisit this to try and find a solution as well as realising that i would get reloads in to do, so back to googling, I found some posts suggesting that you need to install this update.
It is to cure, slow checking for updates (or 20+ hrs without finding updates) as well as 50-100% cpu usage by svchost.exe
X86 Version
X64 Version
IMPORTANT READ THIS!!
You need to make sure that before you install the update that you have disconnected any ethernet / Wifi connections! once installed reboot the system.
Next you need to update the windows update itself
X86 Version
X64 Version
Again i installed this update while disconnected from the internet and rebooted, then i ran windows updates and left it going for what seemed like hrs , it was still checking for updates, so i thought id give it a reboot and noticed a shield on the shutdown button which indicated updates ready to install, so i did and it installed 111 updates, rebooted and ran windows updates again, this time it found other updates in minutes and all was well after these updates.
It really makes you wonder if Microsoft have done this on purpose to try and force people to upgrade to Windows 10 as many people suggesting this on other forums.