How can I get Windows Update to stop rebooting a laptop?

Hi there

Wondered if someone could offer advice as to where I go from here.

I (perhaps rather foolishly) offered to clean up my partner's laptop because she said it was really slow and not working properly.

After I had moved nearly 12,000 videos and pictures on to an external hard drive the laptop started to behave as it should. I ran some anti-malware software and CC Cleaner and cleared out lots of clutter, defragged the hard drive etc and all seemed well.

Until that is I tried to install Adobe Lightroom 5 (as she has wanted this on her laptop for a while). I couldn't get it to install for love nor money. A 1935 Error every time. I know this is a software issue but please bear with me as this does lead to my problems with Windows Update.

After much digging around, various Microsoft articles appeared to point to a NETframework problem and I followed the instructions about deleting it and reinstalling it. All to no avail. After nearly 12 hours of trying I gave up and decided to update her laptop with all the latest updates and hand it back.

But I am now getting a continual loop telling me to "Restart your computer to install important updates" and when I do and go back to update Windows I get the same message. Over and over. It also says I have no updates installed and that the machine has never installed any (even though they were reasonably up to date as I only had to install a coupe of updates when I first got the laptop).

I've run SFC Scan and it says it didn't find any integrity violations and the laptop is running fine.

So basically I'm getting no error messages but I can't install any software or run Windows Update.

I'm beginning to conclude that running a repair installation along these lines.

Repair Install

might be more fruitful than trying to work with a Windows system that's clearly not very happy at all.

Is that a bit drastic or my next step?

Any helpful comments or advice greatly appreciated. I've attached the CBS logs and the Windows Update log.

PS I also noticed that when I restarted the machine for the first time after using the Msconfig utility I didn't get any warning nor any subsequent ones which also seemed odd to me. Every Windows machine I've ever worked on gave that message. Maybe just coincidence?

Thanks for reading!

Attachment 361095

WindowsUpdate.log

Hi Noel

Many thanks for taking a look at that for me. Really appreciated.

I ran your commands. Success on the first one. But I got this on the second command.

"ERROR: The system was unable to find the specified registry key or value"

I rebooted and got the same message from Windows Update. Restart your machine etc . . .

No problem. I'm not in any rush especially if you think it's worth at least trying to resolve.

I'm happy to attempt a repair install but if you think that's a bit drastic I'm happy to leave things in your capable hands.

I'm definitely out of my depth here! So anything more than guidance is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

Thanks again

Hi Noel


OK, downloaded and ran the Update Agent. It started and appeared to copy over about 30% of the files and then I got:

Instal failed with the following error number 0x80070bc9

OK Noel. Really appreciated your help on this. Hopefully the Repair Install will sort out all the shenanigans with the inability to instal Adobe Lightroom at the same time.

But thanks so much for taking the time to look at the problem for me.

Now off to do some reading about how to do a Repair Install!

I'll mark the thread as solved. Thanks again.