Hi Henrik,It's cured. You were right about allowing access to winupdate. The confusing aspect is that some time back, we had to wrestle for a day to get it working after Windows updated itself. It turned out that you had to use the always_direct directive to get it work as it would crash out otherwise.
Don't know what Microsoft have done to Windows Update but it now has to go back to http_allow.
Thanks again, much appreciated, All the best, Julian Pilfold-Bagwell