Thank you for your comments.
You are correct in saying 'just let it continue to scan and some day it will get them all' - another poster had advised the same and yep, it did finally see the 222 Important updates and actually tried to install them.
Most of those failed (likely not needed after all) and several did install properly. Since then no amount of scanning would get any others and when it did get to the results only Optional updates were in the list.
The Optional updates were taking an extremely long time to download - even the disk light was out for quite some time. I finally killed the update effort and then it showed it had downloaded a partial update but showed Cancelled. Ah well...
I then picked one very tiny update of 168kb - I left the download run for over 30 minutes and it never completed in that time. Since this was so tiny it should have completed download AND install in about 30 seconds.
Even when I don't go to and start Check for Updates the Win Update PROCESS starts up, takes the CPU and memory to high usage and keeps them there without ever downloading or installing updates. This is not normal behavior and performance is severely impacted
while they are kept high constantly.
All my computers get Windows updates without issue except for this laptop. This laptop has been updating flawlessly for years until some problems started in June 2015. Again, not to repeat myself - there were network awareness issues which I resolved by
upgrading to Win 7 Pro but the Update problem did not get resolved.
At this point I will likely wipe the drive and do a clean install next week! The laptop hardware is good and quick so it is worth the expense and effort though I started considering a new laptop due to frustration. Once the laptop is healthy I will likely
upgrade to Win 10 Pro.
Since upgrading to Win 7 Pro the laptop runs fast; file downloads are quick and never an issue - the only problem remaining is with Win updates and after a week of chasing it down we have not come to a resolution so a clean install is the next step.
Again, thanks for your comments. SevenForums is an excellent venue to get help from the community and posters like yourself help to make it worth the effort. Keep it up.