When I shut down my Widows 7 PC, there's a notification on the shut down button that updates are ready to be installed. The PC closes down as normal after it's done what's necessary.
When I boot up the PC the following day, a window appears saying that it's configuring updates starting at 0% and the revolving "busy" circle is on screen. After about five minutes. a message appears that windows is unable to configure updates, followed by a message that it's reverting changes. The password window then appears as it normally does and after entering my password, it boots into windows as normal.
This has been happening for around four days now. Should I be trying to update these updates by some other means?
I can't say but it doesn't happen to me like that - either I get the message saying it's updating as it closes down, or another comes up during a session saying "I'm going to restart to finish your upgrade" (which it does unless you tell it not to). Yours doesn't sound right.
Open the start panel in the search box type troubleshooting and when it appears open the trouble shooting panel, scroll down to the fix windows updates and click on that and open fix updates and it will check and repair any faulty ones that can cause your problems . This should help you and also allow you to install SP1 if you haven't already done it.