Updates will not install

I did an in-place repair of XP MCE 2003. I had previously installed all MS security fixes and updates, the list in my "installed programs" showed about 70 or 80 updates.

The in-place repair gave me an unscrambled registry, and an unpatched XP install, without touching my installed programs or data. A good thing, overall, it fixed my major problem.

I immediately went to get all the updates -- 76 of them downloaded. I don't let Updater install automatically -- I get all the updates, but decide which to install because I got a bad version of IE7 that took me a long time to delete and recover from, but I installed ALL security updates. I generally use FireFox, so I didn't view IE7 as a security update.

Anyway, it installed one or two updates, and then said the rest could not be installed.

When I look in "add or remove programs", I now show only ONE update installed under XP MCE -- it is called "update rollup 2 for MCE" and has no install date or size.

I presume this means I got one program that did most, if not all, of those 76 updates.

However, updater thinks there are 76 uninstalled updates still, and pesters me constantly to install them. Every time I allow it to try, it says "some" updates didn't install -- some, as in ALL of them don't install.

Is this because they are all already installed? If the rollup installs all of them, how come updater doesn't know this and stop downloading the 76 updates? I've told it not to install them, and it goes out and gets them again.

This is not a show-stopper, but it's pretty annoying. What should I do?

Thanking everyone in advance...

michael