Windows 8.1 "working on features 100% complete don't turn off your computer"

This happened to me on my Asus Zenbook - 6 days new.  I downloaded Adobe Flash Player.  Ran AVG scanner to make sure things were good to go, and AVG froze.  Couldn't even kill the process.  When I tried to reboot, it went into the "Working on Features 100% complete.  Don't turn off your computer" endless loop.  Looking on multiple posting, this is what fixed the problem - don't laugh at the first 3 steps - it really does work (found it on a MS forum)

1.  Hold down your on/off button for a while ~30-60 secs to power down completely.
2. Push the on/off button to turn the computer back on.  The "Working..." message will appear again.
3.  Repeat Step 1 and 2 for 5+ times, or until you get past the "Working..." message.  It took me 4 times for the loop to break.

On a MS forum posting, a MS tech said that each time you power back on, it attempts to fix things, but can't do it all the way.  That's why you power back off and power back on.  Each time it fixes more and makes a little more progress until it finally fixes what caused the loop in the first place.

CREDITS:  The screenshots below were taken from a YouTube video by Britec09:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s9Jd1miS\_8.  Thank you Britec!

4. At this point, I got a blue screen that looks like the following:

Select the "Troubleshoot" option.

5.  This gives you the following screen:

Select the "Advanced Options".

6. This gave me the following screen:

I selected the "Automatic Repair" and it ran, but told me that the errors were not fixed.  Since every situation is different, this repair may work for you and that's all you have to do.

Since this didn't work for me, I went through the steps again and when I got to the screen above, the next time I choose "System Restore".  What Windows 8 does is it keeps images/settings of the last time your system successfully booted with no errors.  It calls these restore points.  Selecting this option will give you a list of restore points to choose from.  I picked the last restore point and told it to restore.  This can take more than 30 minutes, depending on your processor speed and the amount of data it needs to restore.

Once the restore was complete, I was prompted to restart the computer.  I told it to restart.  My computer boot back up just fine.    Yippee - thank God for internet postings and YouTube videos!

Good Luck!

P.S. : This incident has taught me the importance of creating Restore Points and Recovery Drives :-).

So this has happened on both of my windows 8 machines. So far as I can tell when you start using your new computer there are a lot of windows updates that want to be installed. Windows tries to do an auto update and gets stuck... Every single time. The only way I have been able to resolve this is by "refreshing" my computer, which means erasing any recent work I have done on it, and that is a huge pain! Then Once it is finished refreshing, go into control panel and disable automatic windows updates. I know this is risky as a lot of the updates are security updates, but until Microsoft gets their act together and puts out a product that WORKS I guess this is what I am stuck with.

There is no apparent status to update you on other than that the situation persists. I have this issue right now; there was no new software or anything of the type going on. My network was not connecting so I decided to reboot, hoping to reset the connection, and it gave the above message.  The progress went from 0 to 100% and hung up there. 

A hard reset does not work - the system returns to the same screen immediately upon booting. 

I do not have installation media thanks to Microsoft's decision to stop including it with copies of Windows. Considering how vital it appears to be, this is a very poor way for you to save a buck. This is especially true because we only need it when having issues; and when having issues we can't just go through the "create installation media" process as you somewhat ridiculously suggest above. 

Microsoft: what does the "working on features" message mean?  And how do we interrupt this process?

EDIT: 4 hard resets later, I left in anger and frustration. I left it on, came back 5 minutes later and it had "finished" I guess, as my computer returned to the login screen finally. Total time at "100% complete" was about 35 minutes.

I am having the same issue with my new Asus Transformer T100 also.  Started last evening at 10:00 pm Eastern.  Still getting "Working on updates 100% complete Don't turn off your computer" at 2:07 pm today.  

I don't have recovery disk or disk drive either.

Microsoft - please advise.  

My grandmother is having the same problem. Also an Asus product (ASUS EB1037-B0584/Intel). Windows 8.1 came preinstalled, so we have no recovery disk or drive for it.