I don’t know what it is about the water in Redmond these days, but there seems to be something rotten in Denmark. In the past month, I’ve had at least a dozen machines that have all exhibited the same problem. It starts with a “svchost.exe” error, and quickly leads to machine instability and freezes. As it turns out, 100% of the time it is a problem with Windows Update. I would like to thank the fine people (person?) at Tech Blender for pointing the way to a fix with their “Windows Update Broke My Machine and How to Fix It” post.