Shane thank you for the replies unfortunately my laptop went to not booting up at all the dreaded black screen with a cursor. I tried all I knew to fix it but no go so I had to take it to a real I T guy I know I will let you know what he found when I get it back. using a borrowed laptop for now. I still support what you do even though it didn't work this time for me. thanx for all the effort!!
yes, mines happened similar way too, new hard drive, total re-install and still some errors connecting to updates; problem seemed to reside from updating the windows defender engine as some updates no problem while windows defender had problems.
* looks like the case of update to 8.0 malware from MSFT to me...
Yeap, I believe MSFT does this as they also have end of life, but seems china doing quite well still with XP;
look at the wealth of china VS USA now, I think the real problem stems from lack of being able to do our work VS always changing!
yeap...