Microsoft update takes forever

I switched from windows update to microsoft update for a couple of reasons.
There are office updates I don't want (foreign language thesaurus and
dictionary for example) and I have other MS apps that MSupdate will find
updates for and that is convenient. But MSupdate takes at least 5 minutes
to scan my computer (Dell Latitude, Pentium 3M, 1.13GHz, Win2k, Sp4, 256 MB
RAM). Windows update only takes about 30 seconds. Any idea why such a
disparity? Winupdate and Office update combined take less than half the
time of MSupdate so I am thinking about switching back. Any ideas or input
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.