Prevent Windows 7 from installing a "critical" updates that crashes the system

I am running Windows 7 home premium. Up until yesterday, everything was going just beautifully, until I received a "critical update". As soon as the critical update was installed, the system became extremely unstable and froze up every few minutes requiring me to restart the system several times, with the same results.

I used system restore to roll back the *** update, and everything went back to normal... except that I keep getting a message telling me to restart the computer so that it can install this "critical update". There is no "don't install that crap on my machine" option. Disabling the updates doesn't change anything, turning off the windows update service doesn't change anything either, and being on Home premium, I have no access to the group policies.

Any ideas of what can be done to prevent Windows from installing this update the next time I reboot?

Solution 1:

If you go to Windows Update in the Control Panel and view the list of available updates, you can "hide" selected updates by right-clicking on them.

Once an update has been hidden it will not be installed, nor will it appear on the list of available updates until you un-hide it (manually!) in the future.

You might want to see this link for full instructions.

Solution 2:

I just realized that my problem was that Windows already considered the update to be installed and so there is no option to prevent the update from being installed (too late for that).

On the other end, I was able to uninstall it and the changes will take effect next time I restart.

After the computer restarted, the update was listed as "failed" and my computer is still working properly.