Hi (from a complete Mac newbie),

Had a very similar problem to this - updates stuck on the 'Checking for Updates' spinning icon. Reboot failed to fix problem.

Because I am a newbie, much of what was said above seemed difficult, so I thought I'd just try the one thing I could actually find on my machine, which was to delete:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.pIist.plist

This step alone seemed to fix things for me. Hope this helps someone.

• Patrick

Had a very similar problem to this - updates stuck on the 'Checking for Updates' spinning icon. Reboot failed to fix problem.

Because I am a newbie, much of what was said above seemed difficult, so I thought I'd just try the one thing I could actually find on my machine, which was to delete:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.pIist.plist

This step alone seemed to fix things for me.