To quote Iself of a couple of days previously:
Now to start the W7 laptop and see how simple this mightn't be....
My cynicism proved to be ill founded. Following helpful advice earlier in this thread I went down this path:
1) Set the "sleep' time to "never".
2) Removed the preloaded Office 10. (it was always first in the queue for update - I never used it anyway)
3) Turned off Automatic Updates.
4) Rebooted.
5) Restarted - Automatic Updates had reset to <ON>
6) Went to the Updates menu and told it to "search for updates"
From there on it did all that was expected. I kept on requesting a further searches each time it had finished the immediate process. Finally (about 2 hours later) it advised that 'it was completely up to date'. All in all, a very acceptable birthday present!
Thanks to all concerned.
FOR