To add to what Steve stated above, OneCare in fact will try to perform each successive update that has occured from your currently installed version up to the version that exists today, which could be 2 or 3 total updates. Along with this, if your Windows Updates are not current, it will first be required to catch up with these before it ever begins to install any updates to OneCare.
Worse yet, it's unlikely that Virus and Spyware updates are still supported for versions older than OneCare 2.0 at this point, so you will probably be in a RED condition until all of this is caught up.
My point here is that when a PC is this far behind, the normal update porcesses are nearly useless, so what I do when my sister's dial-up PC gets way behind is the following.
1. Uninstall OneCare completely from the PC and reboot so OneCare doesn't tie up bandwidth trying to download updates during the following.
2. Manually run Windows Update (Internet Explorer, Tools menu, Windows Update) until no more critical Updates are offered. This will allow you to confirm that this isn't your issue, since you can see that these updates are complete.
3 Re-install Windows Live OneCare which will automatically install the most recent OneCare 2.0 version.
In the future, if things seem to be getting behind, try manually running number 2 above to confirm that delayed Windows Updates aren't blocking the updates from OneCare, especially if it's near the second Tuesday of the month when most of the new MS Windows Updates are released. There's one of those today (2/12/2008) by the way.
The reason this occurs is that OneCare uses the same updating back end that Windows Updates do, but in a slightly different way. Unfortunately, with the small amount of bandwidth available to dial-up, this can saturate and cause contention and delays with some dial-up connections, sometimes aggravated by other automatic updates for things like the ISP supported programs (MSN updates) and programs like Adobe Acrobat Reader, QuickTime, Java and others.
OneCareBear
