Dave-H

Yes, the Windows Update page will lose its list of updates that you installed in the past, but they should all still appear in Add/Remove Programs so you can still uninstall them, if they can be uninstalled of course, some can't. You will need to have the "show updates" option checked there of course.

Try running the Windows Update Troubleshooter. This will reset everything on Windows Update and might kick it back into life. You may well still have to replace the muweb.dll afterwards.

From my first hand experience with actually doing the update (which I quickly undid!) "ready to install" actually means ready to download and install. I doubt if the files are already on the machine, especially if the C:\$WINDOWS.~BT isn't present. It's around a 2GB download for the upgrade from Windows 8.1, probably more if it's a Windows 7 machine. It's certainly not going to happen suddenly, it took ages when i did it.

You could try the Windows Update Troubleshooter. That does a lot of resetting of Windows Update, and might fix things for you. You will lose your update history.

@Odos270 Do you have a System Restore point available from before this all happened? I used that on a friend's computer to reset Windows Update to working normally again.

Sounds like you're probably OK to reboot in that case. Windows Update may try to start the Windows 10 download routine again, but you should be able to abort it.

Do you have a hidden C:\$WINDOWS.~BT folder on your drive? If so, trash it, as that's where all the Windows 10 installation files are. You will need to take ownership. Once you've done that, Windows 10 should not be able to install even if it tries after the reboot. What state this will leave Windows Update in I don't know I'm afraid.

LOL! I do have to say that after spending a while poking around Windows 10, I was actually quite glad to see Windows 8.1 back again! As with all new operating systems I'm sure it's very much just a matter of getting used to it, but I didn't much like what I saw at first glance. It did seem to have some advantages, for instance they seem to have dropped the annoying restriction that apps won't run unless you have the screen set to at least 768 pixels vertical resolution, something that's a bugbear on my netbook because it only has a 1024x600 screen! I played (very briefly!) with the Cortana search engine, but backed out pretty quick when it said I had to sign in to Windows with a Microsoft Account to use it, and implied that this was permanent and irreversible. No thanks! The only things I lost restoring the backup were my offline files, which I had to completely re-synchronise, and my Windows Update history, which was annoying. Why that isn't preserved in the backup I have no idea.

Well the restore of the System Image Backup was successful I'm very glad to say, and I've now got Windows 8.1 back. It also restored Windows XP of course so I had to reapply a few updates there, but generally no problem. No worry with the licensing either I'm pleased to say. I'll keep an eye on the guys working on a GMA 3600 driver for Windows 8-10 here, and I may have another go if they come up with anything.

I very much doubt if the graphics driver would have been stable even if I had suppressed the TDR crash, but thanks for that reference! I'm now restoring my System Image Backup, so I will see if it does indeed put me back where I was before! Watch this space......

Well sadly I'm now at the point of giving up with Windows 10 on my netbook. As I was warned, the graphics driver is completely incompatible, even more so than with Windows 8.1. It installs fine, and the lock screen and logon screen are fine, but it crashes as soon as it tries to load the desktop (VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE) and try as I might I cannot resolve this. There are people working on a driver for the Intel GMA 3600 for Windows 10, but there's nothing available as yet. It's annoying, because it must be so close to working. If I change to the basic display driver, and then update to the Intel driver while the machine is running, it installs and the display changes to the correct resolution, and it seems fine, but as soon as I reboot it crashes again. Rather annoyingly, I don't have the option in the recovery menu to roll back to Windows 8.1. I did a reset of the machine at one point and told it to remove everything, and that might have removed the option, although the old OS is still there in the Windows.old folder, there seems to be no way now to get back to it from within Windows 10. I'm going to try the backup I've got of the whole system on an external drive, and see if I can restore from that.

Well, it took ages, but I now have Windows 10 Pro on my netbook! Thanks very much again to @NoelC, and the guys at vmware of course! My first reaction is that it's ugly, even compared to Windows 8.1! It's stuck with the Basic Display Driver at the moment though, so I'll reserve judgement on it until after I've (hopefully) got the proper graphics driver installed. I'm getting error messages from Nero telling me that it can't find advrcntr5.dll as well, but I guess that will come good if I reinstall it, assuming that the version I've got is not completely incompatible with Windows 10 of course!

Well, I'm downloading Windows 10 now, so it did work! Thanks again for the link to the fix @NoelC. I have a fairly recent ISO backup of the whole machine, so hopefully I'm covered in case of disaster, but we'll see. Wish me luck!

Thanks @Tripredacus for moving the post. I've edited my first post to remove the parts that were only relevant when it was in the other thread, to avoid confusion. Thanks Noel. much appreciated! I'll have a look at that and see if it's worth trying. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks jaclaz, understood of course. @dencorso, could you do the honours please? I don't know whether this should now go in the Windows 8 or the Windows 10 forum, I'll leave that up to you.

I had decided that I would try the Windows 10 "upgrade" on my small netbook to assess it before deciding whether I wanted it on my main machine. The netbook is dual boot Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows XP Pro. I registered for the upgrade, but nothing had happened as yet, and when I checked today, i was informed that my netbook had been declared incompatible with Windows 10 because there is no Windows 10 graphics driver available for it. The graphics driver presently installed is the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3600 Series. Now that doesn't even have a Windows 8 driver available (the machine was designed for Windows 7 only, I had great difficulty even finding a Windows XP compatible graphics driver for it!) but it installed and runs Windows 8.1 absolutely fine, so I've no reason to think that it wouldn't run Windows 10. Very briefly, does anyone know any way or over-riding the compatibility check so I can get the free upgrade? Cheers, Dave.

Yes, both installed with no apparent problems. The latter is only a new version of tzchange.exe (now 5.1.2600.6861) to update daylight saving time start and end dates which have changed in some countries.

Interesting. My friend whose laptop I found had what appeared to be a complete Windows 10 installation downloaded on his hard drive, has never seen the "Upgrade to Windows 10 Home" entry on Windows Update, although it looked to be ready to go! Other Windows Updates do seem to be still installing OK under manual control, I'm glad to say. Slightly off-topic, but I spoke to another friend of mine a day or two ago, who has an elderly Windows XP PC, which has been malfunctioning. He now seemed to be convinced that he "must" have Windows 10. I asked him why he was so keen, after pointing out to him that he wouldn't get a free upgrade from Windows XP, even if his machine would run Windows 10, which is extremely unlikely of course. He replied that he'd seen an item on TV where people were talking about Windows 10, and they were saying that it's the ultimate version of Windows, to the extent that it will be the last version, and there will be no new versions in the future! Supposedly these were spokespeople from Microsoft, which I find rather hard to believe! Anyway my friend now believes that anyone who hasn't got Windows 10 is being left behind, as it is the future, now and forever! So, the propaganda is working, at least on the non-technical gullible!

Indeed, I've manually installed that as well! BTW, does anyone know why the .NET updates aren't being offered by Windows Update, as they always used to be?

Sorry, my mistake. There were indeed five updates for the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack. KB2837610, KB3054888, KB2825645, KB2986254, and KB3054890, as you say. The other OS security updates were KB3078601, KB3076895, and KB3073921. The other two of the total ten were the IE8 Cumulative Update and the Malicious Software Removal Tool.

Just an update on my friend's Windows 7 laptop that I mentioned in post #122. I looked again today at it and found the dreaded hidden C:\$WINDOWS.~BT folder sitting there, with about 5 GB of presumably Windows 10 files in it, just waiting for someone to double click the setup.exe file! It was dated from about ten days ago, and how it downloaded such a huge amount of data in the background without anyone being aware of it is rather worrying, as even though the machine is on a connection that's fast for ADSL, it would still have taken hours to download that amount. Needless to say, after tediously wading through all the necessary permissions changes, it was consigned to the recycle bin!

Yes, I had 10 updates yesterday! Four were for the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack, so you won't get those if you haven't got that installed. There was the usual Malicious Software Removal Tool, and the Cumulative Update for IE8, plus four others. Try doing a manual check on Microsoft Update or Windows Update, whichever it is that you use.

That says it all about what's wrong with this semi-forced "upgrade" approach from Microsoft. You don't say what OS your father-in-law is running at the moment, but I guess it's Windows 7. It's bad enough updating Windows 8/8.1 owners to Windows 10, but at least for them it's not a huge difference to what they're used to. For Windows 7 users it's a massive difference, and they will effectively have to learn their computers all over again. For instance, what happens to Windows 7 users who have a huge number of e-mails stored in Windows Live Mail, which doesn't exist in Windows 8-10? Even if the messages all get transferred to the Windows 10 Mail App, this is an enormous leap to expect people to make to using a totally different interface all of a sudden. If those messages are actually lost on the "upgrade", surely that's completely unacceptable! I am just so surprised that MS are rolling Windows 10 out for free to Windows 7 users. Windows 8/8.1 users I could understand, but not Windows 7. A lot of Windows 7 users are going to get a horrible shock when their computer suddenly looks and acts totally differently!

Just thought I'd mention a rather worrying thing that happened to the laptop of a friend of mine yesterday. It's a Windows 7 Home Premium machine. My friend has automatic updates on, and got the Windows 10 advance notification with the system tray icon. He doesn't want Windows 10, and just ignored and closed any messages that popped up about it. He certainly hasn't reserved a copy or anything like that. Yesterday, he closed down his computer, and was faced with a screen which said "installing 1 update, don't switch off etc.". This screen sat there for literally about twenty minutes, with a lot of drive activity, before the machine eventually shut down. Oh dear, i thought, is this the dreaded Windows 10?! On re-start, thankfully it was still Windows 7, but when I went to look in the update history, the update was recorded as "GDR-DU:Cumulative Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3081424)". The update was reported to have failed, perhaps not surprisingly as it's not a Windows 10 machine! My friend was understandably very worried that this performance would be repeated again the next time he shut the system down. With some trepidation I just re-started, which worked as normal. However, the shutdown button had a shield on it and the hover popup said it would install updates and shut down. The first thing I did to try and prevent the update trying again was to delete everything in the SoftwareDistribution folder, and put Windows Update on notify only. The machine then shut down normally, but the shield was still there on the shutdown button. I then decided to do a system restore back at least a week, which fixed that. When I checked Windows Update, KB2952664 was being offered, which said it was 6.0 MB but seemed to be taking ages to download. Suspicious that this wasn't what it was claiming to be, I aborted the download and hid the update. When I checked against this thread, I found that KB2952664 was stated as being one of the Windows 10 download and install requisites on Windows 7. The other two, KB3035583 and KB2990214, I then found were already installed. I uninstalled them and when they were offered again I hid them too! Strangely there are two hidden versions of KB2952664 listed now. One is a recommended update, the other an optional update. The former is 6.0 MB, the latter 6.1 MB, so presumably they're not exactly the same. So, anyone with a Windows 7 machine watch out, it looks as if updates intended for Windows 10 can get downloaded and attempt to install even though you've shown no interest in Windows 10. This has to be an error but it's a bit worrying that it can happen!

I assume the guy had automatic Windows Updates turned on. It's downloaded the Windows 10 update, and when he re-starts it will install it, and it's probably already gone too far with the installation process for it to be aborted without potentially hosing the whole system. I'm keeping Windows Update in the "inform me but don't automatically download or install" mode, as I always do. I'm going to let it do its thing on my netbook when the time comes, but if I don't like the result I won't let it anywhere near my main machine!