Well, to answer my own topic yet again... The repairs ran successfully - the log file for Repair_Windows_Updates was over 3.5MG - it REALLY deleted a lot of files. After the repairs and a restart, I attempted to install 56 updates. It ran for at least an hour, finally giving me a msg that the 56 updates were canceled (no error code), and giving me an option to retry. The retry did the trick - all 56 updates were successfully downloaded and installed.
I am now running a full MSE scan for the first time - this had a corrupted AVG application that I had to use an AVG uninstaller to remove.
The MSE scan has now been running for just over 15 hours - it appears to be about 85% complete, and it has scanned over 3.5 million files.
Assuming I'm not just talking to myself, does that seem like a lot of files and a lot of time? If I set this up to run a full scan every week at 1:00AM Monday and it runs for say 17 hours, the laptop would be useless until 6:00PM Monday evening.