Below are the switches you can run along with wuauclt. Example: wuauclt /detectnow
/DetectNow
/ReportNow
/RunHandlerComServer
/RunStoreAsComServer
/ShowSettingsDialog
/ResetAuthorization
/ResetEulas
/ShowWU
/ShowWindowsUpdate
/SelfUpdateManaged
/SelfUpdateUnmanaged
/UpdateNow
/ShowWUAutoScan
/ShowFeaturedUpdates
/ShowOptions
/ShowFeaturedOptInDialog
/DemoUI
Most of these options don’t give any noticable response, but that may be because of the state of the service.
The command ‘wuauclt /ResetAuthorization /DetectNow’ worked for me right away.
Zero Day IT - Peter V Nguyen 
a nice alternative which i tried is WuInstall ( http://wuinstall.com )
in the free version you can search for certian updates (for example critical ones), download and install them.
Just looked up wuinstall, very awesome, thanks for the tip.