BleepingComputer.com: Vista Updates steps 1-3, then syestem repair loop..

Hello. Wife's Dell has Vista problems. She's been having problems with it a few months, progressively getting worse, now it's unuseable by her. I'm trying to see whats going on with it. Dell wants to fully re-install at this point. I feel a full re-install is probably unnecessary, but nor am I a computer expert. I boot from a vista cd, use an restore point, and get a desktop, so how can it be unrepairable? Back to the problem..

When you power up, it comes to the 'installing updates, step 1 of 3', then counts up. Progresses eventually through update, then reboots to finish. Boot fails & System repair starts. After system repair finishes, 'installing updates, step 1 of 3' starts again.
I figured maybe it had a few updates, thinking positively, but, stubornly, by hour 80 I could see nothing was changing..

I turned off the update feature, but on re-boot, 'installing updates' comes back.
I figured the updates are already resident on the hdd, so I moved all the contents of the WINDOWS\softwaredistribution\Download folder to a new folder, so Vista wouldn't find them. Reboot & 'installing updates' is back.

I see in the update history that there are a whole mess of updates that failed.
If you need me to list them I will. Thanks for reading.

Are you referring to Windows Updates? What happens when you cancel the update process, does the computer continue to run?