Hey man, I tried the 4th method and got something like this I never would have thought you would have to wait up to an hour for updates to be found! Thanks for your suggestion to continue waiting. I had previously run the Windows Update Troubleshooter as you suggested, but it just deleted my update history and did not seem to solve the problem at all.

After about 5 minutes it was still 'checking for updates' and I was about to give up, but suddenly it showed 'updates found' the critical updates could be downloaded and installed in <30 minutes and everything seems stable now. I then went to the Windows Update in the control panel and clicked on 'Check for Updates'. After the computer rebooted I turned the wireless antenna back on, making sure that the connection was manually set to 2.4GHz (not sure this made a difference). Eventually the computer asked me to reboot and I did so. I then clicked on and installed the update in the download folder. Then I turned off wireless so the computer was not connected to the internet.

After downloading I saved the file instead of immediately installing. Specifically I googled the update number and downloaded the appropriate version for 圆4 Windows 8.1 from the microsoft website. Because it is a newer update than the one you mentioned in your original post, perhaps it was a easier fix to the problem of Windows update being stuck on checking for updates I was able to resolve everything in about an hour.

Hi Neil, I solved this problem for windows 8.1 by installing KB3172614 which is a stand-alone update to the Windows Update application which was released in July 2016.

How to remove kb2538242