MS update fails to install any and all updates

I just received my hp dv9000z back from repairs (caused by their defectively designed motherboard). Starting it up for the first time I saw they had created a "test" account to presumably make sure everything worked. I decided that starting from scratch would work out best and went to use my old recovery disks. As I went to start the process, I was rewarded with an immediate error stating that my disks were no longer valid (I assume this stems from them being SP1 at the best possibly strait XP). Whatever, I moved on and just used the rather wasteful recovery partition on the hard drive. After I was done, the first order of business was firewall (comodo), anti virus (avg free) and SpyBot S&D. Next was windows/MS update, where everything fell to pieces.

On the first pass, I had to install God knows how many windows/MS update patches before it would even load followed by SP 3. This seemed rather odd to me as SP 3 has been around for awhile but I figured HP was just using older stuff as usual. After SP 3 was done I ran update again and found about 2 dozen updates that would be a good idea to have. Things downloaded just fine but every time the actual installation process began it would fail after sitting there for about a minute. The post report comes back saying that there is a problem with my computer preventing installation.

At first I thought that Comodo or AVG was preventing Update from working, but disabling these programs changed nothing. Next I searched for one of the updates at random (I think it was the one to fix the daylight savings problem) and downloaded the file directly. This file was installed correctly without error.

So here is the big question: what the heck is going on? I have the files downloaded and stored locally, at least that's what Update says now and I can install them not using Update. I really don't want to manually install all of these one by one.

Thank you in advance for any help
(even the "there is the program called 'Linux' that will fix it all" kind)

 

try restarting!?!

 

been there done that
I guess I didn't mention that part but I have restarted several times

 

You can try looking at ur event logs to see if they hint u on what the problem could be...but IMHO I think the problem is SP3. I don't know if you will mind uninstalling it and revert to SP2 "fully updated".

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934648/en-us

 

Thanks Jakpro, I am going to reboot now since I did need to change that setting.

EDIT: Had to remove SP 3 as well. Now everything is working so far, still have a load of updates left but that happens.