Update...
First, I would like to say thank you to Susan Bradley who facilitated a contact with Microsoft technicians on this issue.
The problem PC is on a corporate network with updates pushed out by WSUS. No other PCs on our network had a problem - all are running either OEM or volume license Windows 7 Pro SP1. Different model PCs, but most have similar software.
We set up a session for Friday, June 13 Prior to the technician's call, I ran CCleaner on the PC to clean it up. Also ran Scandisk which reported no errors. The June updates had all failed along with KB2871997. So once everything was cleaned up, I unchecked
KB2871997 and installed the June updates with no problem.
By then, the technician called had me run sfc scannow and on review of the CBS log, there were a few "corruptions". Then he set the system up for clean boot and he looked through the remaining services and disabled some. On reboot, the computer had a hard
crash - asked to go through system repair/restore, let it do it's thing and it came back on line after the restart. Whew! This was as far as I could go this session. Note, I had not tried to reinstall KB2871997 yet again.
So we set up another session for the following Friday. In the meantime he had sent me instructions on how to run sfc scannow on clean boot. On Thursday a different technician called and when I took a quick look, here the update had installed on Monday
when the user shut the computer off! That was good news!
Being curious, on Friday, I ran regular sfc scannow and in reviewing the CBS log, same corruptions were there. So it wasn't the corruptions that held up the update. For some reason, similar to another user's experience, once a new set of updates installed
successfully, then then KB2871997 installed fine.
The Microsoft technicians were polite and ready to do what was needed to get to the bottom of the problem. Luckily, time fixed this one.
As a side note, I will be looking into the corruption reported by SFC. When reviewing the CBS logs I searched for the word "corrupt" and there were 5 entries, most reporting something wrong with some CHM help files, so I'm not too concerned about this.
Will get to it when time permits.