New developments:
I discovered USB ports (all) are not working with mass storage (thumb drives, external HDD) because of driver error 52, unsigned drivers. The drivers are from MicroSoft, so I think it means that Win7 is corrupt in an area that deals with driver sigs. USB ports do work if I disable signiture enforcement.
SFC continues to report corrupt files that can't be fixed (I ran it & then got the log immediately).
CBS.log - Google Drive
I saw on the MS site that re-installing KB2862330 might work (after all their primary fixes failed), so I tried it. I did not think this would be a big issue since the update was already installed, and I would simply uninstall & then put it back. However, putting it back (i.e., re-install) caused a BSOD on boot, so I had to restore.
In a similar vein, the Win10 nag kept coming back, even though I uninstalled KB3035583 and then hid it after a "check for updates". It should not have been able to re-install. (It also makes my wi-fi load slowly.)
So now I am really considering doing an upgrade in place to get a fresh start (will be the eleventh time, although the first 5 were from a corrupt ISO, so they don't count)...
Aura (or other mods) - please help me decide what to do...is this even fixable at this point? My wife says this laptop is ruining our marriage.
About that: I'm fixing this Dell 1555 (service tag 9322xk1) for a friend. It would not boot, and it turned out the HDD was crashed so badly it could not re-used, even after low-level formatting. (Had to use third party deep format utility, and after that you could write to it, but it would not read). So I put a Samsung 850 EVO 256gb SSD in. I'm installing Win7 Home Premium 64bit, which I have also done on 4 desktops and 3 other laptops. It always installed easily, and updates were never an issue. Until I met Dell (I'm an ASUS fanboy).