The hard drive on my primary machine blew away, so I dug out a piece of junk that hasn't run in a couple years, at least. It will not do Windows update for some reason. I had a USB mouse ball that had been running on it for a week that quit working yesterday after I shut the machine down, moved it, plugged everything back in and restarted it. It said it couldn't install the drivers, a service wasn't running, maybe I had to reboot my system. I can't find any service that looks like it has to do with windows update, running or not.
edit:
It turns out that there IS a service, wuauserv, running. Its description is Windows update and its status is running according to device manager. When I try to do an update, it still says a service is not running; maybe I need to reboot.
end edit
Anybody have any suggestions?

I think windows just gets bit fatigue. The legendary snake eating its own tail for eternity. But it still thinks it knows what it's doing. It spent hours on "repairing the drive"; three days of Spinrite couldn't undo the damage from 25 sectors (1, 2, and 4 sectors were just special somehow...)
I'm going to buy a new machine in the next day or so. If I can get one with an eSATA hook, I can use a docking station to pull what ever I can from the wrecked drive.
If I drop off line for a while, it's because this POS crashed before I could get a new machine purchased and working.
Thanks,
Hugh