Sunday, May 18, 2008

Torturous install of Windows XP SP3

The install went smoothly on a couple of the other PCs I have, so on this latest one I figured the update should be a piece of cake. How wrong I was. It took three torturous attempts and it was successful on the fourth install.

KB949377 is your friend if you encounter an "Access denied" message during the SP3 install.

Why am I still using Windows XP? I generally follow a policy of keeping the OS that ships with the systems. I don't like performing major OS upgrades because it seems that more often than not, there are too many compatibility issues that pop up after such upgrades.

I first let Windows Update try to install SP3. When the error popped up during this first attempt, I thought maybe something oddball was going on, so I restarted the PC and tried again. Same error. Now it seems there is something consistently wrong, so thus began my search for a solution. That took me to the above KB article. I downloaded the 300+ MB full SP3 package (1.5 hours on my slow cable Internet) and then attempted the install (following the instructions in the KB). Again, failure. So I proceeded to the next steps in the KB article and reset a whole bunch of security permissions in the Registry and in the file system.

The problem with all this is the time that it takes. The SP3 install takes quite a long time and the failure occurs towards the end. The permission reset also takes a long time. With this done though, on the fourth install the SP did install. I was afraid that after all the mucking about, the OS might have ended up in a funny state and the PC would no longer work. Fortunately, it restarted. But Windows Live OneCare Family Safety stopped working.

Argh! Uninstall, restart, reinstall and now things look like they are working. For some reason though, on both restarts since SP3 install, Messenger keeps going through an install process. It looks like something is still a bit goofy.

I dislike computers. This is another reason why I am no longer writing software. There are just too many oddball failures whose causes take forever to track down, and are sometimes never resolved.

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