Windows Update causing a stall…

I am running WinXP Pro.

I disabled the Auto Updates feature for Win Updates in the System Properties. That had the irritating side effect of causing the System Properties session to stall on subsequent use.

After some trial and error I have found that if I completely disable Win Updates in the Group Polices I no longer have any stalls. That has the not-so-great side effect of preventing me from doing updates (even manually).

Has anyone run into this before?

I updated and ran: VirusScan, AdAware, SpyBot – all came up blank. I deleted all *.tmp, *dmp, and *.pf files; still the same problem.

I sure could use a suggestion.