Joe and Jamie’s Blog

One of my clients installed XP SP3 on his laptop and many things went wrong. His computer would not shut down properly, it would just halt at “Logging Off” and never move until the default timeout period of 10 minutes would expire and it would shut off. Another issue was the wireless network utility wouldn’t load, so in order to get on the network you had to restart the Wireless Zero Configuration service, set Windows to manage the wireless card, and then connect to the network. On top of all this, his AutoCAD program also would not completely install. What I mess.

I fixed everything by uninstalling SP3, updating the BIOS, chipset, and wireless drivers. I had to also disable the Telephony service because that was causing the hangup on shutdown, even after SP3 was uninstalled. It wasn’t needed so it was safe to disable it from starting.

After all was well, I tried to run the 100 updates that it needed besides SP3. I kept getting the error ‘Error: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded.’ I tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. I found some help on Caffeine Fueled Blog that solved my issue. The entire article can be found here.

In order to restore Windows Updates, with SP3 installed or without it, open up the command prompt and type in the following lines, hitting enter after each one.

net stop wuauserv
regsvr32 wuapi.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 wucltui.dll
regsvr32 wups.dll
regsvr32 wups2.dll
regsvr32 wuweb.dll
net start wuauserv

This will stop the Windows Update service, re-register all the necessary Windows Update dll files, and then restart the Windows Update service.

Big thanks to Josh at Caffeine Fueled Blog for thinking of this.

As of right now, I would say do not install Windows XP Service Pack 3.

I have experienced several issues with the latest service pack. I had a computer not allow users to login after it was installed and another that would just keep rebooting, which is the most common issue after install. The continuous reboots are mainly with AMD based systems, but it has been found with Intel’s as well. I personally had it happen to me with an Intel, but I have also one successful installation as well.

I have also heard that there are many compatibility issues with the HP pre-loading software. Some anti-virus programs, like ZoneAlarm for example, may show new security risks or threats that aren’t true, it’s all XP SP3.

As always, I recommend never installing anything from Microsoft when it just comes out, let everyone else test it out and find the errors first.