Emrys Davies wrote:

"Paul" wrote in message

It suggests here, the damage was done in the year 2015.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...0-2f0e99612b53

The remainder of what you have said is totally beyond me but I am able,
I think, to do things in simple steps. My computer is working well
regardless of the fact that the updates have not worked properly since
2015. Error 80073712 is the baddie and that occurs when the windows
component store in corrupt.

From the thread

"I uninstalled both KB2922229 and KB2984976,
rebooted and checked for updates again."

"It said the same two updates were available,
KB3071756 and KB3060716. I went ahead with the
installation and they installed successfully."

I patched up my system, in 2016. I did a giant patch
run that took hours of work. Since I did it in 2016,
the KB2922229 and KB2984976 weren't offered and
are not in my install list. They were already
superseded.

The following picture shows the KB3071756 and KB3060716
pair, and how a right-click on an item offers an uninstall
item.

Removing the items (if you can find them) should be easy.

https://i.postimg.cc/zGZ2bsRq/window...76-removal.gif

If they're not actually present, then we're without
a solution! So you can start by checking for them, like
in the picture and see if they're there or not.
I don't have KB2922229 and KB2984976 because I started
my patch run in 2016, after the patches had been removed
from the list of candidates by Microsoft.

This article shows how to manually set a restore point.

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...nt-create.html

Doing a system backup is a more complicated step, and perhaps
you already have backup software installed and know how
to do this. You should always have a backup to a second
drive, as protection against hardware (disk) failures.

The purpose of a system backup, is to have an "easy way"
to restore the computer to a working state, if one
of your experiments goes wrong. One time, I absolutely
destroyed my C: drive (NTFS - unrecoverable), and I'd made
a backup on a lark only two hours earlier, *never suspecting*
I would need it that day. And that's the system used to make
that picture, still alive and kickin.

Paul