lofty50,
one of the obvious clues is that you'll have avserve running in the background - if you do a ctrl+alt+del you'll see it the list of running processes and you should be able to kill it there, albeit temporarily.
You can also, depending on your OS, run msconfig.exe
(start--->run) and disable avserve.exe from the startup list. In this case you'll need to reboot and try liveupdate once more.
And download the M$ patch as mentioned in one of my previous posts.
hth
Charles