update Photoshop hangs

That’s a very frustrating one, and fair play sticking with it this long. When Photoshop updates freeze the entire system it usually points away from the app itself and more toward the Creative Cloud installer or something low level on the machine that the installer keeps tripping over.

A few things to try that often help when nothing else does:

• Run the update after a full reboot with no other apps open, then open Task Manager and check if the Creative Cloud Helper or the Adobe Installer is spiking CPU or disk. If one of them is locked at 100 percent, that tells you where the bottleneck is.
• Try changing the install location in the Creative Cloud Desktop preferences. Even pointing it to another folder on the same drive can bypass a permission or file system issue that the installer doesn’t report properly.
• Check Windows Storage Sense and any third party cleanup tools. Some of them aggressively purge the temp folders that the Adobe installer uses, which corrupts the update mid way through.
• Run Windows in a clean boot. That disables all non Microsoft background services. If the update suddenly works in that state, you know a background service is interfering even though it is not obvious.
• As another last resort, create a brand new Windows user account and run the update from that account. Adobe installers rely heavily on user level permissions and corruption in the user profile is more common than you would think.

Given you have been seeing this across versions and even across Windows installations, I would bet on something environmental like a permissions issue or a background service rather than Photoshop itself.

Hopefully one of those gives you a breakthrough, even if the Adobe agents didn’t catch it.