Thanks, Drane. Those explain why Windows Update is slow. However, it doesn't explain why it has become so much slower than it used to be. The speed has decreased exponentially in just half a year or so. What used to take half an hour a year ago, took a couple of hours in the spring and now it can take 24+ hours to find the list of available updates on a fresh install. There's been roughly half a dozen critical updates a month for Win7 including the monthly malicious software removal tool, and for what I've seen the total amount to be installed after using a standard Win7 SP1 installation media has raised from ~130 to ~155 on the first run plus the ~20 updates to the updates installed in the first batch during the last year or so.
Bizman I just did a fresh install of Windows 7 Pro 64 last weekend and running the fix above got it working. Between windows and ms office it seemed like there were about 500 updates and they kept coming waves. The 1st wave was about 260 updates.
I tried that, too. At first I tried to install the first update on the list, let it search for installed updates for an hour or so, when I noticed that for a fresh install they recommended one single update of the Update Client. So I rebooted and tried that. It didn't do the trick overnight.
It sucked having to check for that lame windows 10 crap.
Those can very easily be avoided by changing the settings to install critical updates only. That also reduces the total amount of updates from 500 to 200.