Stage 3 of 3 boot loop - Vista Business x86

After 2 days of getting my machine just the way I wanted it I was quite happy with a nice new and fast OS again. This morning I booted up and noticed some windows updates. I duly applied them and restarted. On start up I got the familiar 'stage 3 of 3' update notice. However, instead of booting it appeared to enter a boot loop :( Safe mode also affected. In the end I had to run recovery from the original Vista install disk and restore to a previous image. Not happy...

Fix: uninstall all .net components. Run an MS cleanup util and then re-install .net in order. Took forever!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923100