Had done windows update earlyer today with IE SP1 and cirticle updates.

I tyed your teqnique for seeing if progress bar is not refrshing but is downloading. I opened Windows Explorer, created a C:\Temp and went to get a small 431kb download from www.webattack.com. I got my C:\Temp opened in explorer and kept hitting refresh for one minute, it remains a 0 byte folder with no files unfortunately.

So it seems that the progress bar is ok, and that the file stream is not being opened or something.

Its realy confuseing, well anyway I went back to system restore and finaly got it to restore. The date i restored to yesterday, so at that point my windows updates are gone. So I go back to do a windows update, but not luck still.

Im concidering formating but I formated yesterday and would prefer not to do it again any time soon. But if It comes down to it I will.

Scandisk has no errors, didn't think that would make a difernce but i did one, and the defrag is done too.

any other sugestions?