[Fix] Preparing to configure updates (Win7 7/10/12 update cycle)

[+Warwagon MVC]

I did all the updates last night before bed and on my Media center which as of last month had a clean install of Windows 7. I got stuck at the preparing to configure updates screen upon shutdown. I turned the computer off and back on and upon bootup I got the same message. It stayed like that over night. When I woke up I went into the recovery mode to a command prompt and deleted the pending.xml from the C:\windows\WinSxS directory

cd C:\windows\WinSxS

del pending.xml

Upon reboot everything was good. My main Win7 workstation installed and rebooted without issue, well it failed on 3 updates, but upon rebooting and retrying the updates they succeeded.

So I don't know if this was a fluke or if this was something related to some updates in this patch cycle. In any case if anyone else runs across this, this should fix you up.

This method also helps fix the issues where a windows vista or 7 machine keep trying to configure updates stage 3 of 3 and keeps failing.