Ran SU on a friend's computer. None of the three updates was huge. Once it got to the Cleaning Up stage on the install it seemed to stall, eventually the spinning beach ball appeared. After an hour of the beachball my friend held the power button to do a restart. It did a double restart (second one about 5 seconds after the first) and now seems to be taking forever on a restart. The normal rotating icon is rotating (not the beachball) but it has now been overnight and it is still at the Apple logo and the rotating thingy.

Anyone have suggestions?

Boot from install / restore disk, verify and repair hard disk and permissions, reinstall OS if necessary. Should do it.

I was hoping you wouldn't suggest that... :-( That was one of the solutions i wanted to try yesterday, but my friend can't find their disk. I can use mine but I was visiting them for the day and am now home, and they are two hours away.... They may just have to wait for a week till I can get back there again. Thanks.

What OS are the running? If they have Lion the can boot from the restore partition and run the utilities from there.

10.7.2
How do I boot from the restore partition?

You should update Lion to 10.7.4. via Combo Update... Download That Here: OS X Lion Update 10.7.4 (Client Combo) (http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1524)

As for the booting up to the OS X Lion Recovery Partition, you can check that out here: How to Boot into OS X Lion’s Recovery HD Partition (http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/03/how-to-boot-into-os-x-lions-recovery-hd-partition/)

You should update Lion to 10.7.4. via Combo Update...

Was trying to do that when the problems arose. If we can't get the computer to properly restart, we can't do an update.. no?

As for the booting up to the OS X Lion Recovery Partition, you can check that out here: How to Boot into OS X Lion’s Recovery HD Partition (http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/03/how-to-boot-into-os-x-lions-recovery-hd-partition/)
Thanks, will give that a shot.

Was trying to do that when the problems arose. If we can't get the computer to properly restart, we can't do an update.. no?

Oh ok. I just noticed that the Lion OS version seemed out of date and suggested as an aside task to do in addition to the main task of fixing this software update issue.

However, did you download the combo installer like I said, or did you attempt to update Lion via Software Update as you said you had updates going on through there?

Update of Lion was via SU.
It was also a slow (2mbs) connnection which may have been part of the problem, but we gave it HOURS.