I ran my updates in Windows 7 but one of them failed.  I had attempted to run updates on a woefully out of date machine in one of the offices here yesterday and the same update failed.  That makes you think.

The update in question was the first service pack for Office 2010.  (I also saw a service pack for .NET fail but haven’t tested this same fix for it.)

I disabled the Windows firewall, re-ran the update, and it succeeded.

The worrisome part is that I received no error or any other information from the firewall indicating it might be part of the problem.  Regardless, disabling the firewall has allowed me to update Microsoft’s Office.  I have turned the firewall back on because I am told it’s better that way.

Enjoy.