I have done a lot of searching on this issue and still have yet to find a solution.... Accoring to event logs, the issue started on my machine 5/1, "generic host process for WIn32 services has encountered a problem and needs to close". It happens at startup only and will occur as it loads the Automatic Updates. I have turned Updates off, rebooted and the error does not reappear, unless I attempt to reenable. The error details involve SVChost.exe and advpack.dll and create a log to appcompat.txt including a bunch of dlls. I have run various antivirus programs (Norton, AVG and anti-spyware (Spybot, Ad-Aware), as well as the latest Microsoft patch that addresses the Generic Host process issue recently. I also attempted to overwrite the advpack.dll and ran a winsock reset as some forums mentioned, but all have not fixed the problem. The only program I installed since 4/26 is Adobe Reader 7.0+, which I have since removed. The error also appears to shut down the Firewall (ICS) service. If I try to restart the OS advises it cannot. If I reboot and attempt to turn off automatic updates before the error appears the service will function and the firewall will work normally. I have not been able to get any updates since 4/26/06 (except the manual patch I installed yesterday), but the application error on the event log did not begin to appear until 5/1/06. I firmly beleive from the evidence this is auto update related and not a hardware/trojan/spyware related issue. Any ideas on how to proceed will be greatly appreciated.

Try here. http://v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/troubleshoot/ You can also try going to the Windows/software distribution folder and delete all the entries that will delete. Reboot and try the updates again. http://computervitals.com/

This did it! Thanks a bunch, that was a simple, yet effective method.