I replaced the hard drive on my Toshiba laptop, running Vista. I restored a Ghost image from a year ago. Now, when I try to run Windows Update, I get the message: 

Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because the service is not running. You may need to restart your computer

I’ve tried restoring two other images, that I’ve restored before so I know they are good images, and I get the same result.
In researching this error on the web, I’ve found 4 fixes, none of which worked for me.



I’ve tried this one from MS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971058
has default mode and aggressive mode, tried both.



Tried this one:
net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
net start wuauserv



And this one: http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/Fix-WU-Download-143759.html





And I tried this one,  which was intended for Win 7, but I figured I give it a shot. http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/cannot-run-windows-update-on-a-windows-7-pc/



None of them helped. And since these same Ghost images have worked for me before, I got to wondering what might be issue now. The images I am restoring worked fine when I restored them before, and all 3 of them have the exact same issue when booted now. It seems unlikely that it is a hardware issue that would cause such a minor issue, and Windows seems to work ok otherwise.

I read online that someone found that if their clock is off by too much, they got this exact error message.That got me to thinking that when I made all these Ghost images, I was in the Eastern time zone. Now I am in the Arizona time zone, and when the image is restored and booted, it shows a time that is 3 hours fast until I go in and fix it. I am wondering if in that initial time when the clock is off, that Windows Update is getting messed up when it goes online during the initial boot process.  Just a wild guess.



Any ideas are welcome.



Thanks

Update: I was able to fix this issue by switching out the new hard drive for another almost identical model. This does not make any sense to me, but it was definately the problem.