Windows Update Stuck on “Searching for Updates” on Windows Server 2012 R2

This one was a nightmare. If you search the internet for “Searching for Updates” you will find a lot of pages but none that I saw had this resolution.

In my case on my server the problem was actually related to Flash updates. After working with Microsoft Support it was discovered that a large number of pending Adobe Flash updates were causing the search to never finish so the fix was to manually update Flash.  This was done by installing KB3214628

Hope this helps someone else out, this took MS Support weeks to figure out.

-Eric