I had a major issue where windows 10 was trying to do a major update but would fail near the end of the update every time with a “fatal error”. It went on for months. The problem is that it started doing it every single day. It would not only slow my computer way down, but my hard drive was churning nonstop for extremely long periods of time while this update downloaded and installed. It was going to destroy my hard drive. I tried every suggestion I could find to get it to install, but it would not. The only think that I could do was to do an install over. I tried that and most of desktop and installed programs disappeared. My browser profile disappeared. And my email program lost everything like it was a new install. The emails no longer showed up. So I had to revert back to old version.
After realizing that I had to stop that update from destroying my hard drive then I found a program that will disable windows update all together. And it can be switched on and off with one click. I tried a ton of stuff to stop windows update but this program was the only thing that worked.
https://www.novirusthanks.org/products/win-update-stop/
i’ll take a look at it, but the installer information indicates: “The program now installs a Windows service to auto-disable Windows updates if they get re-enabled” which tells me the program probably isn’t confident in its ability to fully deactivate updates in the first place ... i have to say that i HATE programs that install F-ing services ...