why has vista stopped automatic updates?

After doing as said and also including the newest KB3216775, I finally got it to start updating...thank you.  Now I can screw my head back on as if basically fell into my lap on this last attempt :)

Your solution worked for me!

I had a fresh load of Windows Vista and all went well until SP2 loaded, adn I tried bothe the auto matic and the large file and same result.

The first three flies were irrelevant to my system, but the last 2 loaded and when I rebooted it after each individual file, the computer acted different. And after about 5 minutes I got 187 updates.

Thank you and I hope this uis useful to others. After all the updates are in, at this late stage in Vista's life you may consider disabling Windowsupdate in services manager, windows will run smoother.

Greetings from New Zealand, and thank you very much for your help Volume Z.

My PC running VISTA ceased processing updates on 8/8/2016. I tried all sorts of suggestions - running a fix.bat file, turning off virus checker etc etc  but nothing worked. I even left my PC running "Checking for Updates" for three days (70 hours to be exact) without success.

Finally, today (Feb 10, 2017) I found your post so I downloaded and installed the five updates you listed above and presto -- I immediately received 137 updates which were duly installed over the next 1½ hours.

Just two updates - KB3167679 and KB3198483 failed to install, possibly because certain files were already running and could not be updated while running. Of course there was no mention of which files were causing the problem !! Any ideas which files they might be?

I installed all these and a couple more I found in another post. They installed ok but the Auto Windows Update still doesn't work.  It just goes on and on forever checking for updates. The last auto update that was installed was KB3170106 on September 21, 2016.  Is there a list I can look at of ALL updates since then to manually install and see if the automatic update will then  work.  I really appreciate your help and I think Microsoft should be the ones to put forth an answer to fix this problem.  I am really thinking I had better try a MacIntosh next time.

Thanks again for helping.