SP2 Wont Install And Recovery Not Work

I am really frustrated. I installed SP2 on my 32 bit Vista Ultimate and it failed on stage 3 of 3 at 100% and rewound itself and rebooted. I then tried my 64 bit system and it installed fine. Tried my 32bit system again and it failed so bad I had to restore C from a backup. Even a recovery would not work. Then did searches as to why this may be happening and tried all the bits advised. Ran the SFC and it reported errors and said it fixed them, ran it again and it found no errors, did the rearm thing even though I did not use any betas and my version is activated, ran the SP2 readyness and it reports no errors, have no disk management software installed so that is not the issue but everytime after it gets to stage 3 of 3, 100% it sits there for ages spinning the disk and then fails and reverts the changes.

Have used the online update and also the standalone update and that reports an E_FAIL (0x80004005). The log file that is produced is huge and gives so much information you can't make head nor tail out of it. I am certainly not taking MS's option and doing a complete reinstall as then I would have to reinstall all of my software and bother heaps of companies for activations again.