Windows 7: Windows manual updates freezes - best course of action?

Firstly I'm no expert so any advice as how to proceed or correct links to instructions would be great!!
Someone I know has an Acer aspire running win 7 home edittion 64 bit.

There was an incident where windows wouldn't load so restored it from an image created last year.

Everything seemed to be ok until a group of 135 updates which failed to install. I checked the reasons why and it stated it was because it had been interupted.
after checking the updates there are a lot of 32 bit fixes which I was suprised to see seing as it's 64 bit..

anyway I tried switching off the AVG free and manually selected to install. this hung up and after 30 mins and showing 0% updates downloaded I cancelled it.
I also tried using the "fix it" ? tool which scanned and reported no problems to fix.
I was set to autoupdate and on each time it's shutdown it tries to re-install 135 updates.
I've had to turn off autoupdates(not recommended) but ideally would like to fix this problem.

One option I've seen mentioned on the interent is to totally re-install windows 7 but think there musst be a less drastic approach.

I have seen the steps mentioned so would they apply to the problems i'm having here??

in the meantime, he's got AVG fre version and spybot on. it could be another month or 2 before having another go at his laptop. what would the consequences be and the percentage risk of leaving it as it is?

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