HP Help and Support Update freezes at boot

Today is the day of notebook problems for me. This one is about my own computer for once, though.

I usually just hibernate my Windows 7 PC, because it preserves all my open windows and tabs, but still doesn't require any battery power like sleep does. I needed to install some updates (I believe I had put off about 29 Windows updates :P) so I restarted my computer for the first time in a while.

The shutdown process is fine, and goes down without a hitch. Starting back up goes pretty well until it gets to the screen when the HP Help and Support updater comes up. It has a green bar that indicates its completion. About half way through, an error message comes up, and I can either continue or quit the update (I'll try to copy part of the error code here soon). If I just quit, the computer continues to boot normally, but none of the updates (Windows updates included) install. If I continue, the HP updater will go until the green bar is almost all the way to the end, and freeze. I have left my computer for 7 or 8 hours, and the updater doesn't finish. I can bring up the task manager, but it says that it's still running. I can force quit, but then the updates don't install.

What can I do to get updates to actually install? Is this a known problem with updates? I want to be able to actually shut down my computer and not have it always do this.

HP Support Assistant had an update that addressed some issues with the old version. Everything works just fine now.