Related to the  issue 623298 , hence merged with it.

The other issue doesn't seem to be about cosmetic issues presenting the error message?

A quick way to trigger this is to wait until an update is available, then kill GoogleUpdate.exe as soon as it starts.

A simple fix would be to use innerHTML in
https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/chrome/browser/resources/settings/about_page/about_page.html?q=%22updateStatusMessage%22&sq=package:chromium&l=79&dr=C