After updates, I get stuck at "Preparing to configure Windows Updates." When I shut my PC down by holding down on the power, turn it on into Safe Mode, it says updates failed and it's reverting them. When it's done reverting them, it shuts down again. When I turn it on again, it's back to "Preparing to configure Windows Updates."
How do I fix this loop?
Best Answer
Had the same issue with Windows 7 update just now (December 2019).
First it would not boot at all (could not verify signature of winload.exe) which turned out to be a case of Windows 7 updating bootmgr on the wrong device, and booting off old bootmgr couldn't verify signatures. Solved by copying new bootmgr to the correct location.
Then, the "Preparing to Configure Windows Updates" truly took very long. This is a Haswell i5 4x3Ghz system with 16G RAM and Windows itself running off SSD with 80k IOPS. So reasonably fast and normally this screen doesn't take longer than 5-10 seconds to disappear.
This time it took well over 20 minutes. Long enough for me to search the web to end up here, read "patience" comments here, crack open a book and read quite a few pages. HDD LED blinked occasionally. Keyboard stayed responsive (numlock/capslock LEDs went on off when pressing the keys). Mouse pointer was movable. So no sign of "crashed", just stuck doing whatever mysterious things that Windows is wont to do.
So if you are able to get back to the "configuring windows updates" screen, simply waiting might still solve it, assuming nothing else broke.
Good luck!