can't access Windows Update in Control Panel

When I select Windows Update in Control Panel, it just hangs, showing a blank window, and the pointer has an hourglass attached to it. (hourglass, not circle). I can get rid of it using Task Manager.

The other parts of Control panel work OK.

I'm also having trouble waking the system after it's gone to sleep. Have to resort to a long press of the power button, which switches it off. This started a week or so ago, but I only now discovered the problem with Windows Update. Maybe the problems are somehow related?



Any ideas?

Thanks for your reply, Richard. I did as you suggested; didn't help, I'm afraid.

best wishes,
David

Thanks for your advice. I can now see Windows Update, but system is still flaky, had a couple of blue screen crashes. Before reading your second, detailed, posting, I tried System Restore, but it failed.

I'll read your posting carefully, also other postings about failure of System Restore. Am busy with other things right now, but will tackle the problem early next week.

Thanks again,
David

madhg said:

Thanks for your advice. I can now see Windows Update, but system is still flaky, had a couple of blue screen crashes.

1.Go to C:\Windows\Minidump and attache to post *.DMP files.
2.Run again cmd.exe and type:

findstr /c:"[SR]" %windir%\logs\cbs\cbs.log >%userprofile%\Desktop\sfcdetails.txt


on your desktop appear sfcdetails.txt file -this file attache to post too

madhg said:

1. C:\Windows\Minidump seems to be empty. No files are shown; I have an administrator a/c; I didn't find a "show hidden files" option.

If you had BSODs and neverless this folder you have empty then probably you have incorrect set pagefile.Restore defaultly settings for pagefile.sys file or use DumpConfigurator to set if you don't wish defaultly settings Windows Platforms Tools

2. CBS.log is not a text file: it doesn't open in a text editor, and the findstr command produced an empty file sfcdetails.txt.

CBS.log is 2.7MB, too large to upload. You might not welcome an upload of a file of dubious type anyway!

CBS.log should be able to open in text editor as well although many times it is huge-never mind.If you have sfcdetails.txt empty that means you didn't run sfc /scannow command before,I thought you did already.First you have to run SFC command and next generate sfcdetails.txt as I said in my previous post

OK, I had tried sfc /scannow but it did not work: it gave a message that it can only by used by an administrator. But there is only one user account on this machine, and it is an admin. a/c. I don't know what's going on there. Maybe another effect of the flakiness of my system?

I ran a full disk check at boot, and it found no errors or problems

I looked in the event viewer and found some system errors. For example:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\DR1.
Details:
+ System - Provider [ Name] Disk
- EventID 11 [ Qualifiers] 49156
Level 2 Task 0 Keywords 0x80000000000000 - TimeCreated [ SystemTime] 2010-01-04T12:31:14.725049600Z
EventRecordID 70809 Channel System Computer Acer-Laptop Security
- EventData


\Device\Harddisk1\DR1


0E00680001000000000000000B0004C003010000000000000000000000082D0000000000000000009F34010000000000FFFF FFFF0600000040000000000000000000061208000010000000003C0000000000000040D0FA8800000000507B4A8900000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Binary data:

In Words
0000: 0068000E 00000001 00000000 C004000B
0008: 00000103 00000000 00000000 002D0800
0010: 00000000 00000000 0001349F 00000000
0018: FFFFFFFF 00000006 00000040 00000000
0020: 12060000 10000008 00000000 0000003C
0028: 00000000 88FAD040 00000000 894A7B50
0030: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0038: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000
0040: 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000

In Bytes
0000: 0E 00 68 00 01 00 00 00 ..h.....
0008: 00 00 00 00 0B 00 04 C0 .......À
0010: 03 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0018: 00 00 00 00 00 08 2D 00 ......-.
0020: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0028: 9F 34 01 00 00 00 00 00 Ÿ4......
0030: FF FF FF FF 06 00 00 00 ÿÿÿÿ....
0038: 40 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 @.......
0040: 00 00 06 12 08 00 00 10 ........
0048: 00 00 00 00 3C 00 00 00 ....<...
0050: 00 00 00 00 40 D0 FA 88 ....@Ðúˆ
0058: 00 00 00 00 50 7B 4A 89 ....P{J‰
0060: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0068: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0070: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0078: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0080: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........
0088: 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ........


I don't know whether to take this literally as evidence of a hardware fault.


Thanks for the suggestion of changing pagefile settings, but I think I don't know enough to do that confidently.


So I think I'll stop trying to fix it, live with it for the immediate future, and some time soon reinstall back to factory settings and see how that goes.