Editted above while you were posting so copied down to here to make more sense:
You don't need to validate windows to download - just tick 'do not validate at this time' and continue.
Just run scans with fully up to date versions of:
Adaware (same update problem until today) - found nothing
Spybot - found nothing
MS Antispyware - found navexcel and exact.bargainbuddy
However don't like the load at startup and TSR nature of MS (unloaded it from startup with msconfig), the way it tries to force auto updates despite selecting no autoupdates at setup and it reported being up to date at install at 5687 but manually downloaded up to 5695.