Win 64 bit home Premium

I have just been through the painful experience of resetting my 21 month old Dell Studio 1555 to factory settings. All went well (ish) and, as expected, a whole succession of Windows updates came down the line. But I have had to disable updates because the latest one did something really weird. First time round it wiped my desktop clean of all entries and 'forgot' all my Outlook eMail account settings. Sys Restore fixed that. Second time it not only cleared the desktop and accounts again, it transformed the skin to what looked suspiciously like Win NT or Win 2K. Good ole Sys Restore again.

Unfortunately there were about 18 updates in the batch so before i go through the painstaking task of doing them 1 by 1 to find the culprit, I wondered if anyone had any ideas?

Well that's interesting. I did them all under manual control, group by group, and everything went fine.

Yeah, I've never had a problem that extreme before, but I don't trust updates to be done automatically. Big_D would probably disagree with me (as would others), but I like to monitor the process myself.

Glad it's sorted.

In the 9 years I ran XP home and the couple of months of Win 7 I have always allowed automatic updates. I've never had a single problem other than recently when Hotmail decided it was no longer going to let my accounts be "remembered" on my pc.