Vista - Office Updates create mayhem. Again.

Hello all,

I had issues last November with what I suspected was a problem with updates for Office 2007 from Microsoft Update.
After a Factory Image reinstall and reloading all my software, everything was humming along nicely.
Then I discovered that my Office wasn't up to date and went over to MS update to pick up the security updates.
I got 20 updates including SP1 for Office.


I have been installing them a few at a time and the last batch included a security update for OneNote 2007 and tw security updates for Office KB951944 and KB954326.
When I went to restart, the SAME THING HAPPENED AS IN NOVEMBER. Exactly.

The computer reboots fine till it gets to the point where I sign in and then somewhere in between the welcome screen and the desktop loading, it freezes solid.
The little tone that sounds when the desktop loads goes into a stutter and then slowly fades.

There is nothing I could do with it so I hard booted into safe mode, where I thought I could system restore (not available in safe mode?) or uninstall the updates (also not available)
On a whim, I tried to restart normally and fortunately it did work, but now my RAID has to repair itself and realign the system information on both drives. This usually takes about 4 hours and I can't make any changes whilst it's re-doing whatever it's doing.

So, I am going to walk away and come back later.

My questions are:
System restore first then uninstall the updates? Uninstall the updates and try without system restore? System restory by itself?

Stop downloading upddates? Grrr.