Last night (10/26/2010) on power down of my PC (Dell desktop w i5 processor, 6 GB ram, 1 TB HD) Win 7 home premium started an update, it has been stuck on installing 5 of 5 updates now for over 9 hours. The hard drive is being accessed but that is all I know. PC had been up to date with Win 7 updates and had been operating fine for months. Why is it taking so long? What do I do?

I have seen this before. Just hard shut-off the computer. Press and hold the power button. Then when you restart it, select Start Windows normally. After it boots and finishes the updates and all is happy, click start, shutdown arrow for option, select restart and all should be ok.

Thanks. I just checked the PC and was going to do a hard shutdown but it finally completed the install! So it finished sometime before 2:30 pm.

Patience is certainly a virtue that you possess. I have seen this behavior when a large number of updates are applied at one time. Was that the case here? There has been some serious security hole plugging going on as well. You may want to check Event Viewer to see if there are any issues. Click Start=>type event in the serch box, select Event Viewer from the program results. Let it populate and click on the + next to critical and then error categories. Is or was there any logged? If not, then update and reboot a little more frequently. P.S.-does your Dell have the Stardock application that creates the unnecessary shortcut bar on the desktop? If you uninstall that, the computer will run much better.