Why am I suddenly receiving these old updates via Windows Update?

May 2014 Update Rollup
June 2014 Update Rollup
July 2014 Update Rollup
August 2014 Update Rollup
September 2014 Update Rollup
October 2014 Update Rollup

Surely these updates would've been installed when I ran Windows Update (Several times/several reboots) after installing Windows 8.0 weeks

Hi,

This is because your Windows 8.0 just installed and some updates doesn't installed.

Well yeah but I installed Windows 8 3 weeks ago and did the following:

Install drivers, reboot
Check for Windows Updates
Install Windows Update updates, reboot
Check for Windows Updates
Install Windows Update updates, reboot
Check for Windows Updates
Install Windows Update updates, reboot
etc.

I continued this process until Windows Update reported no new updates (including Optional updates) to install. Now it suddenly has a bunch of ooooold ancient updates that for some reason didn't get installed when I first went through my Windows Update process.

Sometimes Windows update followed by system feature enabled or plugined installed. For example, only when office installed, its update packages could be checked out by Windows update. Don't worry about this event.

Could it be that your computer has updated to Windows 8.1?

Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro
Windows for IT Pros on TechNet

Why am I suddenly receiving these old updates via Windows Update?

I have seen that too.  For a while I was trying to stop the June rollup which came after the November cumulative rollup (which didn't make any sense to me.)  But around the same time I was in contact with Surface Support about a firmware update which kept being reoffered too and concerned me more and it was suggested that I allow updates to occur automatically instead of trying to "inspect" them before they came and got applied.  As a result I discovered that there were a whole load of pending updates which had never been properly applied.  I guess the manual sequence interferes too much with the designed process.  Kind of annoying though that now I have so little awareness of what might be happening and instead can only really be aware of what actually did happen regarding updates.

FYI