For a week or so now, since the off-schedule high-priority Microsoft updates 2-3 weeks ago perhaps, I have had a six-month young Windows 2008R2 Standard (x64) machine (Hyper-V image) that refused to download updates. Despite doing some minor cleanup, service tweaking, rebooting a few times, it was just plain stuck.
![Windows Update stuck at 0% downloading status](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRHoVYD2D80HVHW62OL-SDnzOpl2U8jzDfxzI262X2F2AIUEJhT84Hg4IKIoY-uueFAcOvPlvLFDikRhKdet0jWZoffGRziBE4R_hMa02WyEaYPmYTR9fTKXTpW85uhZoI8O8PtD6sv1Dz/s320/windowszeropercent.png)
I didn't see any apparent system errors or Windows Update specific entries in the Event Viewer - Windows Logs, System or Application. There were, however, a number of TrustedInstaller errors:
![Windows TrustedInstaller, ntdll.dll event viewer messages](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhexJKSFomlBON3bpuDKbWitzmmo18IVOjOiGqvbFy8q0VE4fbNAoatV8IaS5dhI5LEVRaRbHPXG0kHjxOBeDPfTPAiBpghsqVZ1Sk6GDGydKx4Hze-0krK1a5mh4cBKtQF8n1SRV1F8har/s200/eventvwr.png)
Though I had not had the "opportunity" to experience an issue with Role Management, I was simply concerned with getting Windows Updates back to up-to-date, after days of frustration I came across this MSDN forum post that led me to a working solution.
I worked through all steps of the post marked as answer, finding that an in-place "upgrade" was apparently the only solution that worked in my scenario. This is rather disappointing -- up until now, Windows 2008R2 had never failed me.