For me it was Avast Antivirus **!! Uninstalling it did the trick.**I don't know how is this connected to the drivers, but i got to know this when upon restart the blue "smiley screen" (which is the first screen showing any error, and disappears very fast) showed the avast .sys file name.
I had to completely uninstall the antivirus even disabling wouldn't help.
For those who are still facing the issue uninstalling AV software may help.
I had 3 efforts without success (it gave me the errors 0xC1900101 - 0x40017), I had also problems with dism image (error 11) and some Windows Updates (database error 0x80070490). At my 4th try I found this trick of uninstalling Avast. I used Avast uninstall programme, then I enabled Windows Defender, uploaded its updates and it worked this time! It took around 4-5 hours to update from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1. Then I installed Avast again, and for now everything seems ok.
Thank you for sharing, hope it will help other users.