Guys,
I posted my problem (exact one that you are talking about) under WPast but did not resolve it. I went through all the steps that you talk about in this forum and to no avail, still dead. I gave up. I pulled individual tools to my desktop like battery check and it is OK. HP Support Assistant is a marginal program for me and since HP programmers (or whoever wrote the code for HP) can not give us straight answer, then let it go. Anyway, when prevoius version worked it was annoying at some times checking for updates and finding none. Anyway, if somebody resolved the problem, let me know in order to satisfy my curiosity. Note that I contacted HP and I was given various advices like to reinstall Windows 7, try to unpac sp to find HP Assistant.msi file, uninstall using MS unistall tool which I did, unistall in safe mode etc. All failures!