WinXP Update doesn't

It's been six months since I last tried to update my WinXP laptop. I thought I'd go try fixing all the latest bugs in one fell swoop. Or something like that.

Start -> All Programs -> Windows Update

I accepted Microsoft's stupid ActiveX controls. And, it now sits there saying "Windows Update is looking for available updates... 0%" and doesn't increment itself. I've tried rebooting. I've tried deleting objects and files out of the cache. All to no avail. (And, interestingly, it seems that Microsoft puts the 'update' ActiveX controls somewhere other than "C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Program Files", where "normal" ones go.)

Any thoughts on this? For contrast, I did Windows Update on my girlfriend's Win2000 laptop, using the same network connection and it ran perfectly, so the problem is unlikely to have anything to do with network congestion between here and Redmond...

Thoughts?

Gaah. Turns out, even though I disabled WebWasher, that wasn't good enough. I had to remove it from being my proxy server (even though it was set to pass-through mode).

*sigh*

I realize you've solved this, but I wanted to contribute the solution that I found when windows update stopped working on me. If you're on a win98 box, and your date is set incorectly by years (in this case, a bad bios of some sort) windows update will report that there are no updates available. What it's really trying to tell you is that the SSL certificate was rejected, but it doesn't come right out and say it. This took me quite a while to figure out...

Matthew