having freshly reinstalled Vista Ultimate on my work laptop, Windows update feels it necessary that i download and install 4 language packs for my operating system. I doubt i’ll ever learn Latvian or Swedish anytime soon so having these items litter my update screen irritated me, but I didn’t know of any way to hide them.

This morning, a colleague showed me a way to hide individual updates in Windows Update if you don’t want them. To hide, simply right-click on each individual update item and select “Hide Update”, as per the screenshot below.
NB: You will have to do this for each item – there is no way of bulk-selecting items (that i know of)
NB2: Once you hie an item, you can’t unhide it unless there is a further update to the hidden item from Microsoft.