Further info. I have the machine here for attention and I can immediately see what is causing the problem. Lenovo in their wisdom have installed 20GB of Win10 on a machine with only 29GB of SSD. I have blitzed all of the bloat I can find, all that remains is OpenOffice and few spreadsheets files which are required and a browser. There are no photos, videos or music files. Nothing more than a few 100KB. The update fails as it wants 8GB of free space and there isn't that much left.
So, plan B. Stop updates from happening except that there isn't a switch for automatic updates in the controlling updates dialogue box or the "pause until dd/mm/yy" which one of the on-line help pages suggested would be the answer to my prayers.
Rans6...............