Windows 10 update 1709 Fails at 33%

TopGeek said:

This problem is mentioned so widely on various forums that there has to be a common thread somewhere. For me, I was reminded of a similar situation, a couple of years ago, when I installed a widescreen monitor on my old Dell Dimension 3100, which had comfortably accepted upgrading to Windows 10. In order to get wide-screen resolution, I installed a GT730 graphics card and tried to install the NVIDIA driver. During installation, this caused the PC to stop dead with a black screen. After many attempts, I eventually found that all worked perfectly if I just used the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter.
Well, Windows Update had successfully updated to version 1703 and all was working fine until, a couple of weeks ago, I started getting notifications that my PC could not be updated with certain security features until I first updated to version 1709. So, I clicked the 'Update now' button. That started a four-hour download session, a reboot to install and a stop dead at 33%.
It took a long time, a lot of online research and many many repeated 4-hour attempts before I remembered the previous NVIDIA driver experience. So, at the next failure, I went into Safe Mode, Device Manager, Display Adapter and, sure enough, it showed 'NVIDIA GT730'. I uninstalled it, booted into 'Normal Mode' and checked Winver; version 1709! Whoopie! Success - or was it?
Five minutes later, a black screen and the HDD stopped running.
I started some further onine research and miraculously came upon a suggestion from another poster who explained that, if you uninstall an NVIDIA driver, Windows Update will simply reinstall it. The trick is to not uninstall it nor to roll back but to simply update the driver and select Microsoft Basic Display Adapter from the list of alternatives, leaving the NVIDIA files in place but inactive.
It seems likely that all of these 33% crashes would be caused by similar, if not the same, situations.
So, I just wanted to share this very simple solution to the nightmare of upgrade crashes.

Yes Mostly a driver incompatibility is the issue...
After 3 days and 10 tries, I gave up and disabled updates for My HP Envy 17 3200

I too would have given up if I had known how. I tried disabling Windows Update service and I tried various group policies that should have done the trick but no; Windows Update seems to have the ability to by-pass all of those hinderances and to carry on attempting to install the update.
Having overcome this annoyance (as described in my first post to this thread) I am now confronted with the failure to install the cumulative update for version 1709...but I had better open a new thread on that topic.