DI,
I had the same thing happen, so I did some poking around in my CoH folder and found a new folder titled '~PS'. I moved it elsewhere on my computer, ran the repair/consistency check, and everything seems to be functioning again. I'm guessing that the '~PS' is some kinda collection point for the updates before they're applied. I guess when our PCs crashed it screwed something up in how they report the status of CoH to the updater. Hope this helps.
Signed,
Garrant