The iLife suite is part of this project and I needed to update the version of iLife on my laptop--it still had iLife '08. What better time to do it? The problem is that when you first launch , it wants to connect to Apple's servers and get information on your location to configure Places properly. It politely asked if it could, I replied "No," and a spinning beachball resulted.

After about five minutes this resolved itself, but when it did, the shared iPhoto library from my Mac Pro was nowhere to be seen. Thinking this was an issue with the iPhoto Sharing preference, I attempted to access it, only to be greeted by the previous beachball's cousin. At this point, iPhoto become completely unresponsive. A Force Quit and trashing of preferences brought iPhoto back to its original first-used state. But it also behaved exactly as it had before, beachballs and all.

On my Mac Pro, I checked Software Update's Installed Updates area and, sure enough, iPhoto was now at 8.0.2 and an had also been issued. Fair enough: all I need to do is install the update on the laptop and....

Oh. Yeah. No Internet. Damn.

Resolved:When installing an important update, in Software Update select the update you want to archive, choose Update -> Install and Keep Package. Should you need that update, you'll find it in your Downloads folder.