Nope, that didn't help.
I noticed this behaviour the previous time I had updates too, but installed them anyway. They were updates for Office 2003 (I could see the names when Windows was actually installing them).
So maybe this behaviour is only related to office. Although, come to think of it, I do remember seeing an SP3 update...
Edit: I changed the setting to not include updates for other Microsoft products, but that didn't help either.
Edit2: I installed those 4 (now 5) important updates anyway. Got an error, tried again and all worked fine. After the mandatory reboot, I finally could see the details again.
And I'm glad I did, because those 32 updates were language packs, which are bigsized updates and just the one I needed took almost 10 minutes to install. So, all's well in the end. Still don't what caused it though.