Solved Recovery Disk loads okay...WIN Updates crash system

My father's HP Pavilion a6547c would not boot. All diagnostics reported no problems with the drive or boot sector. Purchased Recovery Disks from HP for the model. Replaced existing Hitachi Deskstar 500 GB drive with a Hitachi 1TB drive and used recovery disks to install the original image and partitions on the new drive.
After the configuration, the system booted up without problems on Vista Home Edition (64bit) SP1. During the installation and configuration, I was never asked to input the Windows Key (located on a tag on the computer) but did notice that a new key was already installed.

Connected to the internet and the system went out to download the recommended Windows Updates. After downloading and installing the system requested a reboot to complete the install. System showed message "Do not turn off computer. Configuring Updates step 1 of 3" (then 2 of 3), system shutdown and restarted. Similar message on restart with step 3 of 3 and then after a long time the system complained that the configuration was not completed and began to remove the updates. After this, the system rebooted but came up with "Windows has discovered a change that will result in intermittent windows functionality." It offers a link to find a solution and then I get a "Windows Validation Interrupted" error and cannot proceed.

I tried the recovery a second time, this time only installing 15 updates rather than the whole set of 120 and had the same problem.

The computer is not under warranty/service plan so I have no HP support.
HP Pavilion a6547c Desktop. AMD Athlon 2 Dual Core processor 5000, 4 GB DDR2 6400 RAM, Win Vista Home Premium 64 bit.
Thanks for any help or direction.

Go to the computer icon on desktop, right click and go to properties. Then in the lower right, bottom, do you see the Microosft validated seal?

In the process of reloading the image for a third time. I will check for the validation seal after it is restored to the factory image.
Thanks

Reloaded the image from the recovery disk. After configuration was completed, I checked the computer properties as suggested by richc46. It did show the validation seal. I decided to change the system key to the original one that came with the system. This time, instead of loading all of the SP1 updates, I went right to adding SP2 and the subsequent updates for SP2. The system had been running fine ever since.
I don't know if the failure was in the 120 updates for SP1 or with the system key that was used by the recover disk but the problem appears to be resolved by using the original Windows System key.