Win7 PC going into sleep mode - while installing updates?

[VirtualLarry]

I left my machine last night, as when I clicked "Shutdown", it had the little shield icon next to it, and it went to a screen that said it had 46 updates to install. I went to sleep.
Woke up this morning, and noticed that the power light on the case was still on, which I thought was wierd since I told it to shut down last night. I moved the mouse to wake it up, and it said it was installing 2 of 46 updates. It hasn't seemed to have moved from that.

The little circular "Swish" cursor is still spinning next to the text on the screen, so I don't think the computer froze up (it's still going to sleep and waking up when I move the mouse).

You would think that MS would temporarily disable sleep mode while Win7 was doing it's updates. I'm not sure what to do, although I just did an upgrade to the hardware on that system, and was planning a fresh install of Win7 anyways, so it wouldn't hurt too badly to pull the plug, even though it says not to power off or unplug the machine.

Oh, the HDD light doesn't appear to be blinking either.

 

[corkyg]

Sleep is interrupted by a keystroke or a mouse movement. The update creates neither. For overnite updates, turn sleep OFF and turn off the monitor. Leave everything else ON.

 

[BoomerD]

Yep...change your settings so that sleep mode is disabled.

Of course, I have "sleep and hibernation" disabled full time anyway.

 

[Lanyap]

Make sure it's not sitting on a prompt for something like Windows Live Essentials update.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Sleep is interrupted by a keystroke or a mouse movement. The update creates neither. For overnite updates, turn sleep OFF and turn off the monitor. Leave everything else ON.

But how can you plan ahead for updates? They just hit you suddenly when you click "shut down"?