Perpetual - "Please do not power off or unplug . . ."

I upgraded my laptop from Xp Pro to W7 Home Premium yesterday.

Today there were over 70 updates to install. I slogged not so merrily along, and now at the end of the day, and many reboots that apparently went AOK, windows explorer was unable to fully load an external HD, so I went to shut down, and lo there was yet another update, so I selected, "install update and restart".

That was over an hour ago. The message is still there and the HD is chugging away at something. Little dots appear after "Installing update 1 0f 1" but that (and the HD blinking) are the only signs that something is happening.

There is no thermometer on this screen, so there is no clue whether this is a malfunction or some sort of pig digests python install that will run for several hours or several days. I hesitate to force the shutdown despite the clear warning not to do that, but this is getting closer and closer to insane.

Please help if you can.

Thanks.

Thanks for your reply - but it appears unrelated to the SW. I did a full recovery of the XP Pro system, totally scrubbed the remaining files and then a total reinstall of W7 Home Premium. All went well as I merrily installed Firefox, my fav antivirus and firewall and other goodies. Then I discovered the bad memory module. This is an older laptop, used primarily as a backup device, so it will now be retired and replaced by a new more reliable machine, probably W7 64 etc. Backup machines are like life jackets, they cannot be prone to failure or malfunction.