To answer your questions. You can restart the windows update services, by going to the start button, click on run, type in services.msc, go to windows update in the list and then click on restart in the upper left hand corner.
In terms of selecting updates, it used to be that you could pick as many or as few as you wanted, but then Microsoft changed that by creating monthly updates, which is all updates rolled into one file for the month.
You should change the windows update to manual and do a manual scan for updates.