After almost 6 months, without updates, I have this laptop up and running now. I have run the 'stand alone installer' many times for 10-12 hours. This last time I ran it, right clicked the icon and saw 5 updates pinned and waiting. Knowing it would run 10+ hours, I rebooted and hit the icon again, it brought up a 'download and install window' with just one update, download and reboot. Now Windows Update saw 60 updates waiting for me. back in business.
(I was almost ready to get a retail copy of win 7 and a SSD, now that is not really an option now)