Windows 7 Update for today, 15th October.

[#1]

ReedRichards - System Protection is/was on for the C: partition, but the System Recovery tools couldn't find a Restore Point; that was one of the first things I tried! I suspect the failure was somehow due to the fact that the MBR had been trashed. Looking just now, the first two Windows Updates don't appear to have created a Restore Point anyway, whereas the last (and successful) one did. Just glad I'm up and running again!

[#2]

I would not have thought there is any direct connection between the MBR and System Restore (which keeps its files in the hidden System Volume Information folder).  Any update process that fails to create a restore point first is behaving irresponsibly.

[#3]

i wonder if this latest round of problems is related to the last time something like this happened when a malware infection effectively bricked windows when an update occurred, its seems that only 1 in 1000 people are affected by the problem which would suggest its either system based or infection based,
if its system based that would suggest its caused by a program of some sort (or lack of it) or that its down to a hardware, but if its down to an as yet undiagnosed infection presence then a 1 in 1000 is a damn good propagation metric..... having said that hours before the update my system scanner removed what it called an infection (and i was late installing the updates) which turned out to be a .exe file from a game i've had for the last 5 years ....

[#4]

I suspect a large percentage of Windows Update failures occur because the computer is malfunctioning in some way or another but this passes unnoticed by the user.  This could be down the presence of malware, or to past malware that fiddled with the settings or to files or settings that have become corrupt or gone missing.
In the past year I have had to do quite a few factory resets on Vista machines that have gone subtly wrong for no obvious reason and with no discernible cause.  One this week started stalling in the middle of Windows Updates and resisted all the standard fixes for Windows Update problems.   

[#5]

Well, no horrors (for me at least!) with the November update today - made sure I had a full disk image first, though!

[#6]

Quote

i wonder if this latest round of problems is related to the last time something like this happened when a malware infection effectively bricked windows when an update occurred, its seems that only 1 in 1000 people are affected by the problem which would suggest its either system based or infection based,

In this case it's been acknowledged by MS that's it's their problem. They released an update that couldn't be completed on most running Windows machines.