How to Quickly Determine Whether or not Specific Hotfixes or Updates are Installed?

Question

I have a handful of applications that require specific hotfixes or updates to be installed.  An excellent example of this is Internet Explorer 11 which has
9 prerequisites. (well only 6 are required, the remaining 3 prerequisites provide a better experience.)
Is there a reliable & fast way of checking for whether or not a specific hotfix and/or patch/update has been installed? 
I am aware of `wmic qfe` but
According to
this, it will only "retrieve updates for Windows OS itself and its components (such as Windows Internet Explorer (IE) or Windows Server roles and features)"
Even if I'm checking for just 1 hotifx, it takes roughly 6 seconds to retrieve that information.  When we're checking for dozen or two hotfixid's that quickly adds up. `Measure-Command {wmic qfe where "hotfixid='kb982018'"}`  So
for IE11, we're looking at nearly 1 minute of waiting.  Nonsense.
Note: I'm not asking "is my system patched?" nor am I asking for a report of installed patches.  I could use WSUS, SCCM, MBSA and a multitude of other solutions for that.  I need something scriptable that will install a specific prerequisite
at runtime, so I'm looking for a batch/vbscript/powershell solution that'll be quick, like 1 second quick, not 5+ per KB.

Answer 1

Thanks.  I'm no expert.  I don't have a slew of characters before or after my name.  This isn't an I'm right/you're wrong situation.  I don't claim to know everything - just trying to mitigate the questions I know I'm going to be asked.
Prior to posting, I saw
your post here (which is great I might add) which works, and it will work for determining whether or not a machine has a specific update/hotfix installed.  But it consistently took 6 seconds to retrieve a single result on our assets.  This
was on a Core i7 with 8GB and an SSD running Windows 8.1 Pro.  This doesn't bode well for our day-to-day systems which are Core 2 Duo's with 4GB and spindle disks.  Unless my math is wrong, if I'm checking for all 6 possible required IE11 prereqs
thats 36 seconds of wait time just for WMI queries.  I'm just shocked it takes so long which made me wonder whether or not there was a faster retrieval method.
Why would I think there's a faster method?  The closest example I can think of might be a software install.  Sure, I can query WMI, but that too takes a while.  But I could a
`reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{product code}` or `reg query HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Mozilla Firefox 29.0.1 (x86 en-US)`
then check errorlevel to determine if the product was installed, right?  Or take it a step further & check the `/v Version` to make sure it matches what I expect it to be, right?   We don't have fancy tools here like Altiris or SCCM
:(  Reg query just appears to be significantly faster than wmic/gwmi in that specific scenario.  That gave me hope there
might be a faster option for checking for installed updates & hotfixes.
IE11
tries to install the proper prerequisites.  If that fails, they'll have to be done manually. 
And it just so happens that the IE11 install
does fail in our environment when we don't install the manually.  Fortunately we're not ready to deploy IE11, so there's no rush to push IE11.  I was merely using IE11 as an example because by virtue of the articles existence, this
is a possible real-world scenario.  If I know that we can safely regression test the 6 patches for IE11, and just have it be an optional installation for the users that want or need it, then I can add the prerequisite logic to the script to help ensure
a successful installation.  Again, an IE11 deployment isn't the goal here.  IE11 is just the example.