Vista - No restore point when updating

Good Evening Folks:
This is a problem that I encountered about two weeks ago and I have been wrestling with it ever since. Whenever I get a list of updates, I download them one at a time since I have had problems in the past doing a batch download.
The problem I have now is that after the first download is completed and I attempt to download the second update the system sticks at the point where it is setting a restore point. I have let the download grind away at setting this restore point for as much as one-half hour but it remains stuck in this mode. It then becomes necessary to do a shutdown and cold reboot to get rid of the update screen. On shutting down the system informs me that it is installing update 1 of 1. It is not. After rebooting, I find that I cannot open any file as an administrator. The screen dims but the 'run as administrator' window does not appear. It usually requires a shutdown and restart of my internet connection to clear up this problem. This happens with both IE and Firefox. In fact, with IE I cannot open any application that requires internet resources until I have rebooted my internet modem. With Firefox i can still make the connection but I still get a dimmed screen on any application I try to run with administrator privileges. If I wait 4 or 5 hours and retry the update download, or wait until the next day, the download will work fine for a single download but not for multiple downloads as single entities.
Has anyone out there run into this problem and, if so, do you have a solution. It is very annoying. As usual, I expect one of you Vista geniuses will have an answer and it would be much appreciated.
Regards
Powell Lucas
P.S. I have run two anti-virus programs, two spyware programs, and one registry defrag program and they all come up clean. I have even run CheckDisk just in case I have a corrupted HD. Nothing.