I found the tips from Trialn Derror and war59312 helpful; disabling the Firewall and re-installing version 10.0.612.1did work fine for ne, but...

I agree, the technical support here does not exist, the troubleshooting procedure for Error 7 posted by google doesn't seem to help anybody or at it least it did not help me; we are posting and trying out solutions that other users tried before and nobody from Google team is assisting, this is just unacceptable.

I also thought at a certain point that this error is purely political, maybe Windows does't like their users moving to other browsers.

Plus, I don't want the Updater and I am not able to find the stinky bastard.