I decided to visit this today not having been there for several months, but I won't upload it says that it can't find the 'old patcher', now I know I could uninstall and reinstall but this will take me about 7 hours so I wondered if anyone had any ideas how to get round that.

Check post #3 in the thread below - it might help.
Myst Online Forums

Thanks IAZ it looks fairly complicated so I will try later on, trouble is I am using Win 7 and I don't know what Gametap is, I just located it via google and have used it loads of times before in 7 so I am not sure why this has suddenly occurred, could it be Norton which is a fairly new virus guard.

You might want to check the Myst Online technical forum at
http://mystonline.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=40

It looks like they had an outage not long ago. I wonder if that could be the cause of your error.

Thanks Jenny, I tried it again today and it just kept updating, although it was running - I checked through Task Manager - nothing happened, I will try again tomorrow.

Can you tell if it's actually downloading anything?
If it has a lot to download, it may take a while.
If it's not actually downloading anything, you may be right about your Norton blocking it. See if you can figure out what program is doing the actual updating and make sure it can get through your Norton.

Yep it downloaded until the last 3 minutes that was when it started to 'hang' I waited for about 1/2 hour with the 3 minutes showing and gave up, I can probably disable Norton to update but I don't really want to play with Norton disabled. I have cheated I pm'd Dadguy and asked him to look at this topic and give us the benefit of his much needed wisdom, as he is/was an administrator on Uru live.