Secondly (the one that CAN be fixed), in the recent typhoon of updates there were 3 updates that gave me the following error: "The following updates could not be installed". That was all it told me.
This error will happen with many updates if the user doesn't have full administrative rights to the machine when logged-in to the current domain. It could be lock-downs put in place by the network admins of your domain, not allowing users to perform updates to the core OS. If I remember correctly from seeing this problem before, more info can be gleaned by looking at the Event Viewer.