To make this thread complete, here is the update...
using recovery disks made on son's identical machine worked!
I had a five week vacation that intervened, but finally got some time to jump back in...
and the burned disks worked perfectly without any issues at all, so far as the recovery process.
During the repeated installation of batches of the "thousands" of Microsoft updates, at one point a new Windows Update client was obviously one of the installed updates... symptom --> processor pegs at 100% and update seems to get nowhere. Reading on web, yup, hundreds of entries of people with the same. Eventually it was solved by leaving it "trying" the update overnight, and it eventually did work through it. A 'fixed' Windows Update client got installed, and it performed more normally after that.
Why didn't I just download a fixed one manually and install it? Because Microsoft REMOVED the fixed one created for users to respond to its big screwup when it put a new working one into the WU update stream. They aren't smart enough to understand that if you are in a situation like mine (essentially unable to run update) making WU the only way to get a fix for WU leaves you stranded.
using recovery disks made on son's identical machine worked!
I had a five week vacation that intervened, but finally got some time to jump back in...
and the burned disks worked perfectly without any issues at all, so far as the recovery process.
During the repeated installation of batches of the "thousands" of Microsoft updates, at one point a new Windows Update client was obviously one of the installed updates... symptom --> processor pegs at 100% and update seems to get nowhere. Reading on web, yup, hundreds of entries of people with the same. Eventually it was solved by leaving it "trying" the update overnight, and it eventually did work through it. A 'fixed' Windows Update client got installed, and it performed more normally after that.
Why didn't I just download a fixed one manually and install it? Because Microsoft REMOVED the fixed one created for users to respond to its big screwup when it put a new working one into the WU update stream. They aren't smart enough to understand that if you are in a situation like mine (essentially unable to run update) making WU the only way to get a fix for WU leaves you stranded.