Well I just want to say 'Thank you' for the great page
http://wu.krelay.de/en/.
I've spent quite some time trying to figure out all the reasons why 'Win Vista' stopped updating a friend's machine sometimes around Jun 2016 (while trying to fix it). Clearly the cheapest option would likely be to buy Win10 and upgrade the whole thing - but it would not give the same joy
.
So after trying numerous pointless hack for dropping SoftwareDistribution dir, reregistering almost all dll in Windows and even way more crazy things - none of them obviously worked in my case. Then found the page describing 'real thing' and suggesting to preinstall
KB4015195 and KB4015380 - well still not good (or at least I was still unhappy with wait time). But then I've added also KB3183431 and magic happened.
The whole thing started to upgrade after around 2 hours.
So perfect
couple days on this research has passed - but I've learned quite a few nice Windows tricks (being Linux user only myself
) so big thank to Dalai (and please if you do not find it to ackwared - keep the info searchable for unhappy Vista users - it still works for some people... - just mention there the 3rd. patch for Vista)