I work at a small non-profit that gets a lot of email from around the country, so we have excellent anti-virus protection and run a virus scan at the end of each day. There was an icon in the systray that said "Windows Update Available" which had been there for a month. One of the volunteers in the office clicked it to install it this morning. The screen flickered and went solid light gray; after 20 minutes, she had tried everything she could think of, so she turned it off and turned it back on, it came up with safe mode as a choice, in safe mode it was a solid light gray screen with the words "safe mode" in each corner. I went in and did a command line reboot. When it got to where it would normally load the registry the message "cannot find registry, attempt to create registry unsuccessful. Please run scanreg" appeared and then it went to the gray screen. Where nothing would happen. I fixed it by using the start-up disk and minimal reboot to command line scanreg.exe; this allowed me to get into system restore, but my question is: What happened? She had just run the anti-virus scan and printed it out like she was supposed to, and we have installed the windows updates through that systray icon before.

Dunno.. im not a tech. Is it a virus? Maybe not. Maybe the update caused a problem. Do you guys have a tech or someone whos sort of responsible for keeing things running well? You might suggest that he disable automatic update and update the machines manually. Also..while you wait for someone who might know the answer to your question.. You could give this online virus scanner a shot Click Me. Incase your local antivirus software has been attacked & disabled.

Something similar happened where I work. The IT dept disabled all of the windows update features. For some reason, this doesn't prevent IE from sending each user the update link for IE. When the download / installation started, the system settings did not let it continue.

Your update just hung for some reason. Sometimes that will happen and when she restarted it, in the hung position it then restarted in safe mode. Next time you do the update it might not have a problem. Dont believe it to be anything to sweat about.