Windows update making no progress after checking for multiple hours

I've been watching my windows update check for updates for the past 3 hours now. I even gave up at one attempt to reboot and try again. No progress has been made, my router light is not blinking. I am wired, not wireless. I tried initiating the troubleshooting steps indicated Windows Update Posting Instructions, but that isn't doing anything after hours of leaving it run either.

I performed a clean install of 7 ultimate x64. Windows update stopped working the update after SP1 (it says you need to update the Windows Update). Nothing has made progress since. Research has shown me that this appears to be a common issue in the past month... I'm clueless with what to even do at this point.

Laptop: Lenovo Thinkpad T61P.

Update on this...

it turns out it was a Microsoft issue (I know, right?). Soon as it got to the specified automatic check for updates time, it finally communicated with the server and we were rockin' n rollin'... it's just too bad that it took over 7 hours of me waiting for it to do literally nothing. Frustrating, but all is finally well.

I went thru same thing on a recent new install, thought it was broken. Hours and hours and nothing happening.
I then tried something, set it to download and ask me permission to install, then went to shut down and saw the update icon.
Shutdown and let it install updates, it took forever with many restarts, had many failures but eventually all succeeded.

I also had another weird error, windows notifications related, had to allow the icon to load in messages, it was set not to display the icon, and updates were failing due to that setting. I found it out by looking up the error code. Because it could not load an update icon in notifications, the updates failed.

Somewhere here a poster pointed out you can download ALL updates for all the OS's in a single file from MS, then install them manually, so no waiting.