See ThrashZone's suggestion:

Reinstalled twice, but Windows still won't update

   Note

Before you start download KB3083710 and KB3102810 in advance, and store them on a flash drive
Start and complete the install without an internet connection

Thanks for the link, much appreciated. Will keep that on file if I decide to do a clean install.

Unfortunately, I don't want to have to re-install Win 7 & jump through hoops just to get the damn updates that worked well for many years until 10 reared it's head. I have seriously been running the lappy with 7 64 every day....for 3 freakin days now! All day long & nothing comes through. Then you have instances where it works with no problems, but those are far 7 few between nowadays. Two days ago I updated 10 & 8.1 on the PC & my Wife's 8.1 with no problems.

On my 7 32, the updates came though on Thur & are listed, but when I tried to d/l them on Fri & Sat it just hangs on "downloading updates" all day long. When I updated MSE today it took over an hour just to get the defs. I have tried various fixes, all kinds of steps, etc & finally realize it's not on my end, it's on MS's end & they haven't fixed it, either out of laziness or they want people to throw their hands up in frustration & say "Fine, I'll update to 10."

Might be worth running RAMMap when running an update check.

Windows 7 updates

How to remove Windows 10 upgrade updates in Windows 7 and 8 - see open handles.

Thank you, I will have a look & see what that yields.

Borg ................ I have really noticed a significant slow down in updating. I thought it might be my connection. Is everyone experiencing this slow down? I agree it may be another snag in the continued use of 7 that MS has thrown down.

It's not just you & me HammerHead, do a Google search & you'll see many people are complaining about this.

RAMmap shows there may be a problem as you stated in the post Callender, but the fix is not easy as you stated.

Last month I must have gotten lucky because the same lappy only took 45 mins to find updates & 1 1/2 hours to install them. Nothing changed except what I added last month, which I carefully scanned to avoid any 10 related patches slipping by.

In the past few months I've seen the instances of delays for 7 updates get progressively worse & worse. It's gotten to the point where several articles have been written addressing the issue. What's next MS?

I'd ignore the suggestion to install net framework 4.6.1 it is not good for a 32 bit system I have
I had to get rid of it and install net 4.5.2 instead,

Then turn off or change the windows update settings to Never check for updates.
Save kb3145739 to your downloads folder to install later after you restart the machine
https://technet.microsoft.com/librar...or=-2147217396

If you get an error installing kb3145739 it's because the new update settings changes did not stick.
The stand alone installer search was lightening fast and finally installed the above kb314....

After installing it restart again
Switch to Check for update but let me ..... then manually check for updates
It took about 5 minute to find the rest of the updates for April plus all of the net 4.5.2 updates
There's no real reason this should work
I can see it as a net 4.6.1 bug on 32 bit in my case though

But the issue did not affect 2 64 bit installs with net 4.6.1 matter of fact neither had any issue finding the updates on startup or soon after without manually checking for updates

One other note is the 32 bit system has always shown 50%++ cpu usage from our friend svchost.exe and now it's back to normal without turning off windows updates