@LeoL I had an issue once with a computer in the win2000 days. It was the sound card. I could load windows the sound would work and then within some period of time sound would quit.
Linux worked fine so hardware was good.
Root cause of the problem a virus! The trouble started with a virus even with new hard drives still had the issue. This is before I knew how to wipe a drove properly.
The moral of the story, I had infected Win2k media somewhere and it kept running me in circles.
I wonder do you have infected media somewhere that keeps propagating the same problem. I wonder could / have you tried building an install usb on a computer not within your ecosystem and installing on a hard drive that was fully wiped or virgin?
As you keep going in the same circle it seems as you say you are doing something wrong. Thinking maybe trying to break the cycle a little . Also maybe try the updates on a friends network never let this computer be on your network until after the updates.
Windows Update decided I had some more updates to apply and I expected that they would fail. But, you guessed it, they updated fine. But the ones that had failed previously still failed.
So, I did an Internet search on the updates that keep failing and found loads of reports of failures with those same updates. So, it appears that Windows Update itself is working okay but there is a problem with just those updates. I don’t know why. Reading through the reports (very briefly) some people seem to have solutions but I haven’t been able to test them yet. There is a lot to read and the machine is a video server so I need to choose my time carefully.
From what I have read it appears that the error code Windows Update is giving is a total red herring. As usual with Microsoft their website says to look in the event log for more information but the event log merely gives the same error code again and absolutely no more information.
For the moment I’m just going to ignore the updates but if any of the solutions on the web work I will try to remember to update this.
Very soon I plan to replace the machine with a Linux server and I will probably give that more priority than the Windows Update issue. A while ago I replaced a WHS 2011 server with FreeNAS and I was stunned how much better it was. I’m hoping that the Linux Video server will also be so much better than the current set-up.
Given the number of reports with these updates I’m really shocked that Microsoft has not pulled them or put more information on it’s website about the issues. But in all the time I’ve used Windows Update I’ve never had one fail before.