Latest Vista Update stuck in Stage 3/restart loop

It worked fine for me. I had to start running it from the Vista disc to reach DOS, because F9/F8 command in the start- up made me run into the same loop over and over again. I didn´t yet experience any problems with up-dates or any other functions after this operaton. I believe the 3(3)0% problems occured after an abrupt power failure. Thank´s for the tip MickyO! ( I would not have dared to use it if I had read the"Method 3" way of solving the problem at the Microsoft home page before I read yours though)

I have the Vista Home premium 32-bit version by the way.

Thanks Again!

I have had this problem today too and I support the final couple of comments of davidmac11 - please get this fixed as it has undermined my confidence in auto-update which I have also switched off.

For interest's sake - the process I used to stop the continuous re-booting was to hit the F8 key on one of the automatic re-boots and select "Repair your PC" from the menue that came up (selecting a "safe mode" option did not stop the re-booting). I was then able to select the "System Restore" option from a menu that came up and restored back to July 26th.

That seems to have stopped the re-booting for the time being. However, I see that my shutdown option has updates pending so I think I will try to rename the "pending.xml" file procedure described in MickyO's post.

Thanks to everyone for this assistance.

SRK50.

Thanks for the suggestions.  I did reply earlier, but it seems the message did not make it.  The gist of it was this.

The looping wouldn't let me boot into Vista safe mode, even using the repair disk, or i could have done a system restore from there.  So SFC scanning didn't work.

What did work was following the article at  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949358 that you mentioned.  Method 3: Going into DOS and renaming the pending.xml file plus the other suggested registry changes.  That stopped the looping, and i was able to restore the system to prior the Windows update.

I have the following suggestions that could improve the experience for others:

1)  The repair disk boots you into an X: drive directory.  From there, my machine wouldn't respond to the the cd command suggested.  My DOS being a little rusty, it took me a while to think to change drives by typing C: before typing in the cd string.  If this is a generic issue, it would be helpful to us non-DOS experts to include the instruction to type C: before the change directory instructions.

2)  Since the registry changes and the original update failure itself may have damaged the registry, it seemed prudent, once having access to Vista, to restore the system to a time before the Windows update event that caused the problem.  Adding this action into the instructions may be beneficial.

3)  I see from all the many similar posts, that this stage 3 looping problem has quite a history, and has not been fixed.  So my last point is more of a plea to Microsoft to please fix the problem - permanently.

This frustrating experience has undermined my confidence in the 'auto-update' feature, which i have now switched off.  Many "experts" recommend checking monthly for updates instead of using the auto-update feature.  So i shall try this approach in future.

Thanks for your helpful input Amritha, MickyO , Oliver and the other posters.

Regards,

davidmac11

Hi Cazbam ,

Not to sure with your screen problem sounds to me that you are not getting power to your monitor,

(are you on laptop or desktop ???) if desktop

Id check that all connections are connected and check that your monitor has power.

The above restart loop fix works well all be it a pain in the ____.

sorry I cant offer any more advice.