MS Updates Taking FOREVER and/or stalling.

I'm setting up a fresh XP system which has a clean version of XP home installed just yesterday. The computer works beautifully. Yet I'm having a heck of a time with MS updates. My cable ethernet is working fine. These updates just seem to hang and do nothing. There are 120+ updates needing to be downloaded. I start the process, it got to update 26 and just hung there as if it was downloading a enormous file, the particular KB it was downloading was tiny - I checked. The computer is not frozen. I reset, tried again and this time it did the same thing on the very first update. It's as if there is a problem on Microsoft's end, yet I have never encountered this kind of thing before. Yet, it's been a long while since I've worked with XP.

Reset again and decided to update Internet Explorer manually, and from there install the updates individually. I have to update IE because the current version 6 is futile to try to use. I downloaded IE8, started the install/update process and it's just hanging there on "Downloading Updates for IE8". It's been 30 minutes. So regardless of what I do and how I do it, when it comes to MS updates, I'm f'd right now.

I noticed as well that the Windows Update site takes an insanely ridiculous amount of time to search for updates. That green progress bar just goes and goes for a good 45 minutes before it stops and reports back. That was the first warning sign of trouble.

What is going on? Thanks.