Windows XP SP3 Creating Havoc

ozmanjusri writes "According to Information Week, within hours of its wide availability Windows XP SP3 had drawn hundreds of complaints from users who claim the update is wreaking havoc on their computers. One user said in a Microsoft newsgroup: 'I downloaded and installed [the SP3] package for IT Professionals and Developers on one of my computers. Now I can't get the computer to boot. I don't think Microsoft should have made this a critical update.' Other sites including IT Wire are also reporting problems, which include include random reboots or the inability to boot at all." Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8; and after a successful SP3 install users will no longer be able to downgrade from IE7 to IE6.

Comments

One problem machine out of many installs

[Fez]

I have installed SP3 on several systems, and I have only had problems on one. It was my laptop, and I had known there were problems with the underlying Windows installation for months but wondered if SP3 might fix them. It did not. It ended up in an endless cycle of BSoDs from which it never did recover. I ghosted the drive, wiped it clean, and installed from an XP CD with SP3 slipstreamed. Now the laptop is running better than ever. I am not sure if SP3 has anything to do with that, or the fact that it's a fresh install with new, recent drivers. (most likely the clean install.)

The BSoD/stop errors I received pointed to a driver issue with DEP, but without being able to boot even in safe mode there was no easy way to debug the problem. I could have tried a repair install, but I felt more comfortable starting from scratch.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Embolism]

Same here. I just upgraded a laptop last night for total of five systems. All were pain free.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Enry]

I'm actually going through this process now and can answer your question.

I went to install XP SP3 in VMWare and I hosed the image while it was updating, rendering the underlying OS completely useless. The only way I could coax it back to life was to reinstall the OS over the old one, and even that didn't work. I'm now spending way too much of this morning creating a new image and reinstalling everything from scratch. I don't use XP for much, so I didn't really lose anything in the process.

But compare this to most Linux distributions. If there was a failure of one part (e-mail, SSH, even the kernel), you only need to repair or fix that one piece and you're back and running again and that repair can be done independently of other parts of the system. I'd wager the only time you'd need to wipe a Linux disk and start from scratch is if you've been pwn3d and the binaries have been replaced with trojans. In the case of Windows, it's hard to track down the actual cause of a problem, and even then replace whatever configuration or binaries were corrupted. Given the time and searching involved to do so, it's easier to wipe the disk and start over.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[harry666t]

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: decent operating systems don't even have to reboot.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[superpulpsicle]

M$ is teaching the industry a dirty capitalist lesson of how to wipe out old inventory, in this case XP SP3 purposely handicapped vista. Next time you bring your car to get an oil change, the mechanics will blowup the engine and offer you a new car.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[GaryOlson]

The dominant OS in the world easiest way to fix is by re-installing!! Just seems weird...

Why, YES, with a proper network install server, install configuration, binary server, and network mounted home directories, Linux is much easier to reinstall than repair. The same can be said for Windows (XP or newer), Solaris, and many *nix systems. I can fix a system during lunch and a meeting.

Locally stored user data and locally installed applications is a completely different item. This is subject to the speed and availability of the backup system.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Sobrique]

I can honestly say that I can't actually remember an occasion where it's been easier to rebuild Solaris, than fix it. I've had quite a few varying degrees of 'fubar' but invariably the problem's I've had have either been fixed by software (in most cases, not even needing a reboot) or have been a hardware fault (which in some case _have_ needed to take the system down).

The same cannot be said for Windows systems I've worked on - the time and effort involved in troubleshooting is much much higher than the effort involved in a rebuild.

*shrug*. You _can_ get utterly hosed on either, but Solaris is still better at keeping entropy at bay.

Although I _have_ done a 'wipe and restart' on a shared filesystem though on a few occasions, where whole departments have denied responsibility a massive dogpile of disorganised data. A 'restructure and clean' (tell 'em it's being ugpraded) works well for making them figure out what they actually need to keep/need backed up/are willing to pay for, and what they're not :)

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[msuarezalvarez]

Hmm. Why?

Anyone is free to offer whatever product they want, even as inadequate as Windows. The industry, on the other hand, could have been more selective.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[Thalagyrt]

28 minutes? I've got three brand new machines running Vista and they take about 45 seconds tops from power on to login, that includes POST. Two are laptops, one's an extremely powerful audio workstation which takes about 20 seconds. You're either doing something extremely wrong, or you're lying about them being brand new and are trying to boot it up on a 486dx with 4 megs of RAM.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[_xeno_]

Which is why Apple did a great thing with Time Machine. That's exactly the kind of stuff you need for home users: A total nobrainer, invisible, transparent, automatic. And it allows you to restore only the one file you need, not do a full rollback.

Vista has this feature, there's a tab called "Previous Versions" in the properties dialog for files and folders. Microsoft calls this feature Shadow Copy on the list of Vista features.

The problem is that MS has stopped thinking about "advantage for the user" at least 10 years ago.

Except that it's only available on the Ultimate and Business editions (footnote D as of the time I linked it). Home users don't get it.

But it's a great feature (despite the crappy slow and flaky UI), and one that should be available on all versions of Vista if Microsoft was intelligent and not trying to nickel-and-dime their customers. It's the only feature of Vista I've ever used that made me think "I'm glad I'm using Vista, I'd have been screwed in XP."

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[CastrTroy]

For your roommate, Try setting the theme to "Windows Classic". It will end up looking like Windows 2000, and will speed up the interface by about 100x. I have a Vista Laptop with Celeron 1.7 and 512 MB of RAM. Before windows classic theme, it was slow beyond usable. Not it runs quite respectable. Sure it won't look pretty like Vista is supposed to, but at least you'll be able to get stuff done.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[arminw]

.... On multiple occasions I've brought in ailing MacBooks (and MacBook Pros) to the Apple store and the only advice the "geniuses" have had for fixing the problem has been a clean reinstall. ....

With the low costs of portable storage devices, I keep one with a clean OS handy. If the internal system fails, the computer can be re-started from the external fire wire drive. If there is an internal drive software failure, the disk repair program will usually take care of the problem. If not, the user data can be copied from the internal to the external drive. Then a program such as Carbon Copy Cloner can be used to re-copy the external drive onto the internal one. The end result us a working computer with minimal effort. With time machine, Apple has made it simple to also keep backups on a network volume.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[nmb3000]

Oh boy. I can understand people saying they prefer Win2000 over XP, or that they have no real need to upgrade (even 7 years after the fact!). The problem is when people are so blind or ignorant that they pretend/don't see the real improvements that XP (especially with 2 service packs) has over 2000.

In what way was XP an improvement over Windows 2000?

In a word? Multimedia. In more words? Security, GPO, native hardware support, support for newer versions of IE, Remote Desktop, etc. If you really don't see the myriad of ways XP improves on 2000 I'm not going to try and list them all. Besides, Wikpedia already has (more or less).

By artificially limiting the number of active connections?

Except that it doesn't. XP SP2 introduced a limit to the number of half-open connections you can have open at once. The limit (10 by default) is essentially never reached during normal use. Some poorly-configured Bittorrent clients can hit the ceiling, but it isn't that hard to disable the limit if you do a quick search.

By providing more bells and whistles slowing things down?

Yes, they improved the user interface. But by gosh, you can turn it off with a single checkbox!

Better support for hyperthreading and dual core is the only thing I can think of, but even that could easily have been implemented in a service pack for W2k.

Better yet, they should have just released Service Pack 7 for Windows NT 4. After all, what improvements did Windows 2000 offer over NT4? This same discussion happens every time a new version of Windows is released. If you don't see any reason for you to upgrade, that's fine, but it doesn't mean that nobody else needs or wants to update.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[SanityInAnarchy]

Vista likely runs fine an a $2000 desktop. O RLY?

Try this: Disable indexing on your hard drive. Now open the start menu and start typing, as a search. Each character you type will spawn a new search in a background thread. Which means if you type "Hello, world!", you just spawned 13 separate threads, each of which is now crawling your entire hard drive.

Tell me that's not broken.

If she waited a year or two to buy a vista computer: it would meet the real-world requirements. And in a year or two, Vista might have a service pack that fixes retarded shit like the above.

Microsoft likes to alpha test on their customers. The only way out of it is to either not be a Microsoft customer, or to use a six year old OS. Meanwhile, I'll be over here using Ubuntu, which is pretty much mature and tested, and never more than six months old.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drsmithy]

Vista isn't that bad, but contrary to the marketing materials, you will need a pretty good system to run it.

No, you won't. A US$450 PC runs Vista fine.

Seriously, when the most important factor in Vista's (like OS X's) performance is RAM, and 2G of RAM costs under US$50, in no way do you need "a pretty good system". The PC necessary to run Vista well hasn't been "pretty good" for years.

Re:One problem machine out of many installs

[drinkypoo]

Sorry, I just can't agree. My lady has an all-intel Dell Core 2 Duo 1.4something GHz machine (Vostro 1500) with 2GB ram. It came with Vista home basic luser edition and was so. unbelievably. slow... I couldn't believe how slow it was. I slipstreamed the storage driver into an XP CD and installed that, and the system is wonderfully peppy. (It's not a monster, but it's plenty fast.) Vista requires a monstrous machine, with better-than-intel graphics. One last word; I disable the themes service on XP. I'd rather have the snappier win2k interface. But to each their own.

Oh Yes It Will

[RupW]

Note that XP3 won't install on systems running beta IE8 It won't be offered automatically by Windows Update but it *will* install. However you then can't remove IE8 without ininstalling the service pack first.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[nqz]

Also, the summary is misleading. If you downgrade to IE6 *before* installing SP3, then you'll be able to install and uninstall IE7 at will, after installing SP3.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[Amiralul]

Funny how, on the official IE7 page, there is no option yet to download IE7 for XPSP3.
I've installed SP3 offline, over my SP2, but there was no IE7 with it.
But it's ok, IE6 is doing fine over here, not stressing him to much since the Mozilla launched Firefox.

Re:Oh Yes It Will

[Hyppy]

The reason for this is the way that IE7's uninstall procedures occur, and the fact that SP3 works for computers with both IE6 and IE7.

When you install IE7, it creates a backup of all IE6-related files that it replaces, in order to replace them if the user uninstalls IE7.

When you upgrade to SP3, it replaces files that are used by both IE6 and IE7, most of which have different versions depending on which browser is currently being installed.

If you were to uninstall IE7 after updating to SP3, then it will revert to the pre-SP3 binaries that were copied during initial setup.

Now, I agree that the SP3 setup should be intelligent enough to identify and replace IE6 files located in the IE7 uninstall folder, but honestly it was probably a very low priority.

The fix? Uninstall IE7, install SP3, then re-install IE7. Not an easily automated task, but thats what needs to be done if you want to be able to uninstall IE7 in order to revert to IE6 in the future.

Either way, its not a massive conspiracy. You can put your tin-foil hat away today.

Easier to read version.

[AltGrendel]

Here.

It has a banner add at the top, but at least it doesn't have the rest of the cruft on the page.

People mess with thier own machines..

[Tominva1045]

FTA: Typically, the glitches are due to conflicts with software, such as drivers, system files, or applications already resident on the user's PC. The machines arrive in a pristine state. Users then add, sometimes compliant sometimes non-compliant software, hardware, and modify the registry. There should be no surprise that issues will arise. There are less-popular operating systems with upgrade / driver issues way worse than this.

Issue Specifics

[sean_nestor]

From this article on ComputerWorld:

According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."

Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.

The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said.

Re:Issue Specifics

[synthparadox]

Hrm. Thats interesting because my main box runs on an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe with an AMD64 X2 5600+ in it and my Dell Latitude D630 laptop runs a Core 2 Duo and I updated both without problems yesterday. In fact the install yesterday was the most flawless install of anything I've seen in a while.

Worked well for me

[EasyTarget]

At the risk of getting flamed to hell (this is /.)

SP3 actually improved my old thinkpad. The XP copy on it was really struggling after years of being used as the 'windows toy'. No media (my bad) so I've never reinstalled it. I allowed SP3 on with some trepidation, but the end result is that the machine is a darned sight more spry (fast and responsive) than it was before. I think the installer basically did a good job of repairing the OS while patching it.

I was pretty surprised.. it's pretty rare that anything from Redmond makes me feel that it's an improvement..

Re:Access Denied!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

And there is an Run As... Administrator option in XP

Re:installing SP3

[geekoid]

No they are not.
You should wait to see what happens on other computers before doing any OS upgrade.
If you are a single user, wait, if you are a company put it on test machines.

Your an idiot for not understanding the the PC upgrade history is far from stellar. Yes, SP2 was fine, but that's hind sight.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it"
That's exactly how you should deal with computers.

Re:Nudge Nudge Wink Wing

[Anonymous Coward]

No DRM is involved with file copying. Really it isn't. File copying was slow in Vista for a variety of reasons, most of which arefixed in SP1.

Failed to work for me....

[UttBuggly]

...when I attempted to install it on a standard Compaq Evo N610c laptop. Other than a 2nd NIC installed in a card slot, this is a vanilla machine with IE7 and Office 2003.

The SP downloaded and began the install just fine. Ran all the way to the end, which took over 2 hours, and then popped up a dialog after reboot that the installation "...has failed and will be rolled back. This is a two-step process..."

Pressed OK and it took about 45 minutes and a reboot to finish. After boot, I got the "your system has encountered a serious error" dialog. So far, everything SEEMS normal, but I haven't done much as this is my 3rd PC, hence his starring role as "SP3 sacrificial lamb".

Disappointed, but not particularly surprised this SP has issues.

Re:I love the /. bias

[manifoldronin]

I'm not going to defend the /. bias, because it's there big time, and we know it.
But I'm sorry, I am just not buying this "there are too many configuration combinations to test" argument either. Not when we are talking about the third service pack of an operating system that has been running mainstream for 6 years. Not when it would prevent a computer from booting at all.
Hell, at this point in XP's life cycle, there should not have been any service pack at all. All Microsoft should be doing for XP is pushing out real critical security patches, which should address only individual paths.
And as to the success rate Microsoft should be held to, I don't know if it has to be 100% across the board, but I do know that when I've paid for a piece of software, when the vendor of the software has an automatic upgrading mechanism in place that would do even the most radical upgrades behind my back, and when those upgrades could completely shut me off from accessing my computer, yeah, I would think I have every right to demand a 100% success rate on my computer.

Re:no IE6?

[Darth_brooks]

Have you flashed the firmware on those Jetdirects? Usually that will get you working on a semi-recent version of IE.

I've had the same issue with older Compaq and HP iLo ports. The last firware releases for the product will at least let it work with IE 6. In particular, I had an iLo port that firefox wouldn't go near, but after a firmware flash, IE6 gave me a quick nag screen about an expired cert, then connected like the insecure little whore that it is.

One reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Better application compatibility. Some of my older games worked in Windows XP right out of the box. In Windows 2000, you would have to download some toolkit and mess with some settings before they ran properly.

Re:Issue Specifics [HP and AMD]

[quaero_notitia]

No problems with my Intel processor based systems, but blue screens at bootup on all of my HP and AMD processor systems. The fix is to boot into safe mode, change one value in the registry, reboot and viola! I'm back in business. Even granny could do it. That's probably why Microsoft failed to mention it. ;) Oh, my Vista SP1 install on HP took six reboots and about two and a half hours. It failed the first three times. I'm going to make some money from these service packs!

Not net drivers -- security software

[BanjoBob]

Microsoft is telling people that the problem has to do with script blocking by various security/anti-virus/ad-malware products that are installed.

They say you need to uninstall your security software (McAfee, Norton, Symantec, ...) BEFORE you install SP3. Then, you may reinstall your security software. While on the phone with one of their Indian or Pakistani speaking reps, they never once mentioned anything about network card, adaptors, drivers, .net, etc. It was all security product related.

BootCamp disk space issue solved!

[zerofoo]

There is an issue with XP Service Pack 3 when installing on a Mac with BootCamp. During the free disk space check, the SP3 installer reports that there is not enough free diskspace.

The fix is a quick registry edit:

Create a regkey(REG_SZ) (String Value) called BootDir under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup and set the value to C:\

Reboot, and then proceed with the SP3 install. That little bit of knowledge cost $295.00 and 3 hours of my time.

-ted