Ooh, I am such a liar. That optional update did not have to do with monitor drivers. It is a display software update and it did not install which is fine because I think it is really old. Or is it about drivers? When I click on more info it says drivers. It says released March 2011, published December 2012. Should I do this?

I was not watching over my computer the whole time it started up tonight and think I may have missed something but am not sure. I saw it at 15% configuring (from the auto updates) and a few minutes later it was on the screen that gives the option to do start up repair or start normally. Not sure how it got there, if it restarted itself or what. I hit start normally and it came up fine. I do see one of the update installations failed though.

You might have found your culprit.

None of them had failed previously, just today.

Please see my edit above regarding that optional update.

If you want to update video drivers, do it through the website for the video card, not through Windows Update.

For example

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

or

http://support.amd.com/en-us

So a display software update has to do with video drivers? This is my monitor isn't it? This is what the update says:

Dell Inc. - Display - Dell ST2320L_Analog

Download size: 23 KB

You may need to restart your computer for this update to take effect.

Update type: Optional

Dell Inc. Display software update released in March, 2011

More information:
http://sysdev.microsoft.com/support/default.aspx

Help and Support:
http://support.microsoft.com/select/?target=hub

I very much appreciate your help Jenny100 and Draclvr!

Actually it does seem to be a monitor update if this is your monitor...
http://www.dell.com/al/p/dell-st2320l/pd

And the 23KB size is certainly much too small for a video card.

So it's probably harmless.

Yes, that's for your monitor... I would ignore it especially since it was that optional update you selected.

I would do a restart and see what happens.

Thank you both. I did not end up doing that update. I checked it last night thinking it would do it along with the auto updates but it didn't. Don't want to restart now in case I have a problem. Need to sleep soon and would rather go to bed on a peaceful note.

If you want the monitor driver, it's probably better to get it from the website of your monitor, not Windows update.

I think this is the driver, which seems to be newer than the one at Windows Update. But make sure I have the model right.
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=JDPVJ

I think that's it Jenny. Thank you.

Today it froze up after reaching my desk top but when I restarted it was fine. I'll have to spend more time with it this weekend.

I saw an interesting suggestion here -- that what looks like a freeze could be your mouse acting up.
http://www.powersolution.com/my-computer-keeps-freezing/

Thanks again Jenny for this link. Another thing to look at this weekend as well as cleaning the computer up a bit I think. Last time when I had this problem I did change out the mouse but it didn't change anything. Also need to look into that failed update installation. Still shows failed in my update history. There's an error code that I looked up and there is a solution showing that I will look into.

Good luck.