Per Engh's solution worked perfectly, so thanks very much for that. It's always good when someone gives up their time to help desperate people (well I was desperate anyway).
I have McAfee VirusScan 7.1 and XP Service Pack 2, but this might work for other configurations too.
Just to elaborate on Per's solution a bit. My 'Update Now' worked perfectly until I applied SP2, after service packing my PC I got the following error everytime I tried to run an update "Failed to initialize Common Updater subsystem. Make sure the McAfee Framework Service is running. McAfee Common Framework returned error 80070005 @ 2".
To resolve this do the following...
- Run Component Services.
- If, like me, you don't know where this is, run Help, change to Index, type in 'component', click on Display to display Component Services, then click on the link to start Component Services.
- Once in the console, expand Component Services
- Expand Computers
- Expand My Computer
- Expand DCOM Config
- Scroll down the left-hand side to FrameworkService
- Right-click on FrameworkService and choose Properties
- Select the Security Tab
- Set Launch to Default (this is the top option in the top section)
This should be all you need to do, it certainly worked for me anyway.
Good luck and many thanks to the helpful people on this forum.
Alan