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Windows Patch Leaves Many XP Users With Blue Screens
CWmike writes "Tuesday's security updates from Microsoft have crippled Windows XP PCs with the notorious Blue Screen of Death, users have reported on the company's support forum. Complaints began early yesterday, and gained momentum throughout the day. 'I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to,' said a user identified as 'tansenroy' who kicked off a growing support thread: 'From then on, Windows cannot restart again! It is stopping at the blue screen with the following message: 'A problem has been detected and Windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.' Others joined in with similar reports. Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by 'maxyimus' was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens."
first po
Stop OxOOOOOOFC (OxB5FD7D64, Ox76F3E963, OxB5FD7CDC, OxOOOOOOO1)
A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
THL phish sticks
lol, 10 years and it isn't stable yet :P
All I keep hearing in my head is:
They put the update in, you take the update out!
They put the update in, shake your laptop all about!
"You do the hokey pokey and you uninstall the patch! That's what it's all about!"
"ooooh... the windows bluescreen."
"ooooh... the windows bluescreen."
"ooooh... the windows bluescreen."
"That's what it's all about!"
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I saw and fixed a similar issue in January. A particular KB had patched a .dll that was in fact rootkit infected, breaking the reference to some function call. Windows BSOD'd, claiming the whole partition was unmountable. Rolled back the KB in Recovery Console, sanitized the OS, and reapplied the KB. Problem solved.
. . . my Windows XP updates get pushed, pulled or shoved down my throat . . . this sounds like an excellent reason to clone my hard disk before rebooting, and logging on to my company's network . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Here is a list of Microsoft stuff to remove from your XP slipstream:
Automatic Updates (for reasons related to the article) .NET Framework
Windows media player (including 6.4) because it downloads codecs at will.
Accessibility Options (unless you need them)
ClipBook Viewer (useless)
Games
Internet Games
NT Backup (use a modern backup)
Paint
Pinball
Screensavers
WordPad (use openoffice for that)
ActiveX for streaming video
AOL ART Image Format Support
Images and Backgrounds
Intel Indeo codecs
Media Center
Mouse Cursors
Movie Maker
Music Samples
Old CDPlayer and Sound Recorder
Client for Netware Networks
Communication tools
Comtrol Test Terminal Program
FrontPage Extensions
H323 MSP
Internet Connection Wizard
IP Conferencing
MSN Explorer
Netmeeting
Network Setup Wizard
NWLink IPX/SPX/NetBIOS Protocol
Peer-to-Peer
Share Creation Wizard
Synchronization Manager
Vector Graphics Rendering (VML)
Windows Messenger
Blaster/Nachi removal tool (get Avira!)
Color Schemes
Desktop Cleanup Wizard (just have clean desktop)
Disk Cleanup (CCleaner instead)
Document Templates
DR Watson
Extensible Storage Engine (Esent97) (Ancient)
File and Settings Wizard (Useless)
Help and Support (Utterly useless)
IExpress Wizard
Manual Install and Upgrade (Just keep good system backups)
MS Agent
MS XML 2.0
Out of Box Experience (OOBE)
Search Assistant (the dog)
Service Pack Messages
Shell Media Handler
Symbolic Debugger (NTSD)
Tour
Web View
Zip Folders (rar instead)
Error Reporting
IMAPI CD-Burning COM Service (imgburn for these old devices)
System Restore Service
Hardware shell detection (this is one of the pieces that allow USB viruses to run in the first place)
You know how I know they are lying? They are posting complaints online. We designed this patch -specifically- to stop online complaints about updates. They clearly haven't actually updated.
-Bill Gates
'I updated 11 Windows XP updates today...
You updated your updates? You're doing it wrong.
... and then they built the supercollider.
An MVP poster in the thread claims that KB977165 causes the problem, and that the problem only occurs on computers that have been compromised by exploit code. The patch in question patches the NT kernel executable files.
If it is true that only compromised computers blue screen then it's hard to fault Microsoft for their patch code choking when it stumbles across the exploit code.
I wonder if they are going to push out an updated patch that at least performs some sort of sanity checking before attempting to modify the files. I doubt it. They'll just pass the buck and tell users that their computers were already hosed and that the BSOD is a "feature" and that they should have re-installed the OS anyway (because we all know that once your Windows box is pwnt, the only way to deal with it is full format and re-install).
And people will still be ignoring it.
Good idea. I have my updates set to ask to download and ask to install. On download I'm reminded I need a backup, so I shut down the system without installing the updates, do the backup, boot to install, reboot, cross fingers.
Is anyone doing rsync backups (ooh, maybe even snapshots) of XP? Can rsync handle all the fs info needed to get a good backup? Right now I am indeed imaging the whole drive.
Well duh... How is Microsoft supposed to make any more money from you if they don't trash their old OS?
Windows costs less, is more secure, and superior to opensource OS's. And hope your boss hears you before your fired.
My machine has a hard drive partition with the "recovery" disk.
I think I have automatic patches turned off on the XP box but I have automatic patching on the windows 7 box.
I think I'm going to figure out how to turn it off when I get home.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Running a patch server so I can personally release patches as I please.
Several users posted solutions, but the one laid out by 'maxyimus' was marked by a Microsoft support engineer as the way out of the perpetual blue screens.
I don't think this is the solution you were thinking of. The linked solution has these notes:
So it seems "Cody - Support Engineer Microsoft Support, Moderator" had second thoughts about a minute after marking this as the solution.
[Disclaimer: I run Linux, not XP, so I don't really care either way.]
How is Microsoft supposed to make any more money from you if they don't trash their old OS?
I'm glad I did not experience this threat yet
Why would TFS even highlight that post in the discussion, when the support engineer's promotion of it was retracted almost as soon as it was added?
...indicates that this *was* after all, the nostalgia patch.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
LOL Harder!!
'I updated 11 Windows XP updates today and restarted my PC like it asked me to
What sort of loon patches multiple machines without first testing the patch?
XP has about 70% or so of the client market. How many millions or tens of millions of patches have been installed successfully?
I let Windows inform me about updates, and I choose when to download them and install them. If nobody else has any problems after a week or so, then and only then will I download and install the updates. I learned a long time ago not to trust anything from Microsoft.
I'd like to thank all of you who beta tested the updates for me!
I updated yesterday and haven't had any problems. I feel like I won the lottery!
LOL! Games played since 1996:
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You can install the recovery console as a boot option:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654
(You should have an I386 folder somewhere)
It is more complicated for Vista and later:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/archive/2007/01/12/how-to-install-winre-on-the-hard-disk.aspx
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
This is different from.... what?
from ars: Users in the thread have tracked down a fix, though it requires using a copy of the Windows disc (or for netbook users without an optical drive, a bootable USB drive with Windows on it): Boot from your Windows XP CD or DVD and start the recovery console (see KB307654 for help with this step) Type this command: CHDIR $NtUninstallKB977165 $\spuninst Type this command: BATCH spuninst.txt Type this command: systemroot Good luck. When complete, type this command: exit
Otherwise, as you said, it's the universes way of trying to tell him something.
I can't take you seriously when you AC and use caps.
Call me tonight and I'll fix it for you.
And wear something sexy.
Resistance is futile. You WILL upgrade to Windows 7 as instructed. We are in full control of your computer. Your computer will remain deactivated until you comply with our instructions. You have no alternative but to obey.
Erm... ALL of those have run on Macs since 1996.
Citations? Sure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst
Look in the righthand column.
Hey I'm sure this news will never make it over to the geniuses at Neowin. They've got too much to make fun of with apple's new hardware.
Because newer versions of windows suck.
I am quadriplegic with a tracheostomy to breathe. That means no keyboard or mouse and no auditory input. I control my computer with eye movement (the only muscles I still fully control) tracked via infrared camera. Almost every system built to assist communication for people like me are built on top of WinXP. There is a Mac version I have heard of but AFAIK doesn't do full control like the one I use. There is no Linux availability at all (oh how I wish).
So I am stuck. This system is my voice and my window to the world (travel is a major production requiring a team of assistants). it controls my immediate environment (tv, lights, etc.). It represents the last bit of independence I possess. It is a Tablet so "pop in the CD isn't so easy.
I am very careful to avoid viruses and other malware (always was when i was healthy and Win32 was only a secondary OS for me then). But to be stabbed in the back would be utterly devastating to me. It could be weeks before I could get qualified help (Nerd Herd, etc. need not apply).
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
This is how they solve the problem of backwards compatibility and get everyone onto Windows.Next or Win8 or whatever. Break all OSes prior to Win7 with "patches" thereby forcing everyone to PAY UP SUCKAS....
Erm... ALL of those have run on Macs since 1996.
Didn't say otherwise. Re-read my post.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You can install the recovery console as a boot option:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654
(You should have an I386 folder somewhere)
It is more complicated for Vista and later:
http://blogs.msdn.com/winre/archive/2007/01/12/how-to-install-winre-on-the-hard-disk.aspx
Nope. If you follow that link, you'll see you still need the Windows XP DVD to install the recovery console. Sadly, it was not uncommon for XP systems to be sold with no recovery console. My Toshiba laptop (I'll never buy another) did not come with a Windows XP DVD, merely a "product recovery disk" which wipes everything off the hard drive and does a fresh install. No recovery console available. Apparently there's a huge difference between buying a computer that comes with XP and buying a computer that comes with "XP installed."
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
As I alluded to in my comment, all you need is the I386 folder. It is mostly likely present at C:\I386.
(I am typing this on a computer that did not come with an installation disc; I used the I386 folder to build one (with SP3 slip-streamed in). I have used that CD to install Windows into a VM.)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
No shit Sherlock.
He was implying that the poster has only played those games, since he hasn't been using windows and those games are pretty famous for being cross platform.
What I don't understand is why "you can't play games" is supposed to be some sort of universal knock against people who don't use windows. I never played games even when I did use windows, it's just not my thing.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
You say this like it's a *bad* thing...
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
You can buy a second one, which you'll eventually need to use to figure out how to fix the first one when Windows inevitably shits the bed.
I haven't touched Windows for about 10 year, and I'm not planning on getting a job that requires me to. If anything goes wrong, I suppose I only should be happy. Less Windows losers to take care of.
The problem with Linux is that it's inarticulate. Look at Ubuntu, which is arguably the easiest way to get someone to use Linux if they're from a Windows background.
It works great, it's faster, and most configurations work right out of the box. if you have one of the few configurations that have been checked by the developers. (If you've got an ATI card like I do, Fuck You.) If you've got an older machine without one of the specific wireless cards detailed in document XR-122-65_rev_a_kernel26.6.1, you can with ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant. Rolling back the kernel version will also improve compatibilty on older systems. All of thse commands can be found on forums online, so there's lots of support for... ...what the FUCK are you talking about, Beardo? My machine USED to work, and now it doesn't and that's because I listened to you.
Windows is dominant because they write and market to people who aren't technical users. Read that bolded sentence again. Apple is hauling up their maketshare for the same reason -- they are marketing to the vast majority of people that want a computer but didn't spend their childhood in the CS lab. My dad doesn't want to learn how to use a command line to set up the email. My wife, lead tech support for distance education for a College, didn't like Ubuntu because of the Flash problem.
NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT PROPRIETARY DRIVERS. IF THE SHIT DOESN'T WORK THEN IT IS A LINUX PROBLEM. (Yes, even if it isn't.)
Hell, MS still has their ridiculous search, when you could just drop to a shell and type "dir *foo*.ext /s | more" and be done in 10 seconds. But you see, if you weren't the kind of person who reads /., I just a) bored you and b) acted condescending and c) said something unintelligible.
Linux is a spectacular tool, but like calipers, $30 ESD wirecutters, or my $200 soldering station, just aren't the right tool for the majority of people out there. If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Sorry to hear you have no backups, Doc.
why are you people still using xp?
Because -
a) I already own a license
b) It suits my needs
c) It's what my employer requires me to have on my at-home on-call PC. Since they're footing the bill, I can hardly complain. See a) and b) above.
Wait a minute, I remember those from back in the day! Hah, not fun.
:P
It still surprises me why people still use XP - a 9 year old system. Come on, people. Upgrade. To Ubuntu.
I have XP still (I'm forced by itunes) - but I'll probably chuck it out now, for I have no XP install disk and I don't want to update and have it dead, but I also don't want to not update and have it cracked. And I suggest all in my position do the same. Bye bye XP. I won't miss you.
From TFA: "To regain control of their PCs, users were told to boot from their Windows XP installation disc, launch the Recovery Console and enter a series of commands."
STOP COPYING LINUX ALREADY!
If you already installed the patches, your clone
will have the bad ones too.
BTW, the bad patch apparently is KB977165.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I'm feeling like a broken record here. I don't think you could consciously code up an OS with more holes than Windows has. Why on earth is it so damned vulnerable that any tiny code change can topple it over? Tell me again why people still use Microsoft products?
Try this before the "maxyimus" fix - boot Ubuntu or Systernals ERD and delete that pesky HIBERFIL.SYS and the $RECYCLER while your at it. Reboot to a functional computer. If this doesn't fix then "maxyimus" it is.
I use one too. Its called windowsupdate.microsoft.com
The cool thing is, I know I can turn off automatic updates and not worry about maintaining a server. Maybe you are getting a PhD too... ?
Exactly
Games played: None since Atari 2600. I'm fine with that.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
If the developers get their heads out of their asses and learn how to market the software AND give the public what it wants, then and only then will Linux get its fair share of the market.
The question is why would developers want to expand their market share among the non-technical users? Personally, I could care less if my mom uses Linux. You know why? Because she is not a developer and will not contribute one line of code to the OSS world. I want Linux to develop a following among the technical/programmer crowd. This means a larger developer base, which means a greater pace of improvement. This has been happening consistently for the 15 years I've been using Linux and that keeps me happily on this platform. Its all about Developers! Developers! Developers! to me. Microsoft and Apple can have all the rest.
When someone decides that there is money in getting non-techies onto Linux, they will be able to polish Linux into something really slick. Ubuntu is trying, but there really doesn't seem to be enough money in it now so they aren't able to apply a lot of resources to it. Who knows? There may never be any real money in that kind of market (for Linux, anyway).
NT - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750081.aspx
2000 - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/174630
Now the same with Windows XP? Come on now, who are they fooling?
Reminds me of that stupid stride commercial - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxBlKFxGhNk
For those of you who feel left out with a working computer - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.aspx
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
What I don't understand is why "you can't play games" is supposed to be some sort of universal knock against people who don't use windows.
It's not a knock, it's a small poke meant in a light-hearted way.
I have to admit, I'm not sure why you're confused about this. There is no mystery here. Lots of energy is spent making Linux play Windows games. If that's not enough to cure your curiosity you should go to an Apple store and watch the people there orbit the games aisle hoping to find something new. Lots of people want to play games and there are a fair number of them that go about it the hard way.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
When I was in college, a friend of mine who lived down the hall from me came to my door one day frantically knocking. She had stored the only copy of her PhD dissertation on a floppy disk, and the disk had gotten corrupted, and she didn't know what to do.
I poked around on it for a little while, trying out a disk sector editor I had to see if I could recover anything, and I couldn't. It was just lost, period.
She ended up going dumpster-diving. She had thrown away a printed hard copy the day before, and they hadn't taken the trash away yet. She was literally in the trash dumpster, sifting through two apartment buildings' worth of trash to find it, and spent that entire night retyping it from scratch.
I felt sorry for her, and I remember thinking, "Well, I guess that's one way to learn a lesson that you'll never forget..." I was also really glad that I wasn't her significant other, because you know who would have been sifting through that dumpster.
Maybe that was the only way Microsoft could figure out to make it completely secure.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Running a patch server so I can personally release patches as I please.
Running Linux so I don't have to worry about junk like this.
Also, while command line may be faster than GUI, GUI is easier and here's why: if I want to do some task, I can look at the toolbars and in the menus to fins an item that looks like what I need to do (for example, if I want to find a file, I'll look for a button or menu item named "Search", "Find" or something like that. I will recognize it when I see it), but on a command line, I basically need to remember the exact command for doing what I want to do, for example, I would need to remember the whole "dir *foo*.ext /s | more" command if I want to find the file, it won't work if I type ls instead of dir or if I type search instead of find or I forget to write the /s. For less used commands this gets difficult.
Linux is great, but only when it works right after install and you do not need to install other programs. Otherwise it gets very difficult very fast.
Meh...
If most people had to install Windows to get it to work on their PCs, they'd be in the same boat they are currently in with Linux -- they wouldn't have any more clue how to install and configure Windows than they do Ubuntu. Having installed multiple flavors of both Windows and Linux, Ubuntu currently has the easiest installer I've ever seen, bar none. And I've had all the same problems you've described with Linux when I've had to install Windows from a retail (vice OEM) CD. In fact, I've even had to boot a PC with Knoppix, just to find out what kind of hardware was inside the case so I could go download Windows drivers to make the hardware work. However, since every PC maker since Windows 95 has included Windows installed by default (at least until recently), non-techie Windows users typically don't have to worry about it. Now, Windows is what Grandma expects on her PC. And since people, as a rule, are afraid of change, that will be the default until someone gives someone a compelling enough reason to use something else. Unfortunately, at this point, I suspect the only thing that will be compelling enough is, "You can't get a PC with Windows, anymore, ma'am...".
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Same thing happened to me with a kernel update on CentOS5 last week. Now this week when updating XP. I'm terrified of the update OS X has waiting for me at home :(
I wondered why my brand new xp netbook gave me the old blue screen the other day. Msft, just be glad they don't make airplanes.
I've never tried rsync, but I've used tar and gzip/bzip2 using Samba to backup Windows admin shares (C$). Unfortunately, I have never been able to successfully restore the Windows OS based upon such a backup. I've always had to reinstall the OS, reinstall the apps, then restore the data. AFAIK, imaging the drive is the only way to completely restore the system -- OS, apps and all -- from a backup of a Windows machine.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Upon hearing the news of the botched update problem, Steve Ballmer pulled out his trusty Netbook while on the road to begin sending denial responses to the many complaints about the issue that had made their way to his mailbox. Naturally, his Netbook was set to the Windows XP default of "Download and install updates automatically" because his own trusted baby Microsoft told him it was best. Little did he know, before his last shutdown, the botched updated had downloaded and installed, and Mr. Ballmer was greeted with the famed Blue Screen he was just preparing to deny.
158 men, women and children died that day. They were found scattered through the halls of Ballmer's hotel, with but a single bloody chair wedged into a corner wall.
In this economy I could use the extra $$.
As you may have read elsewhere, MS doesn't use context or offset diffs. They just replace files. So the case you speak of is unlikely.
The most likely case is that people who are having the problem have a foreign DLL in their system that calls directly into an offset into this DLL without version checking it. This DLL does so because it's a rootkit, and it wants to fly under the radar. When you change this DLL that other DLL is now calling into invalid code.
But the problem here is this other DLL is bad. It isn't a problem in MS' DLL at all. And how is MS to prevent this, are they to somehow figure out every other DLL in your system that could try to call into this DLL using surreptitious means?
MS didn't know this rootkit existed, or if they knew, they didn't test with it. That's about as far as I can blame them without any more info.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Heh. Okay, you have to admit, that door swings both ways. Watch...
Useful skills learned while playing games:
Ordinarily I would have let this go, but you reminded me of a programming teacher I had back in high school that thought video games offered nothing but a waste of time. Instead I have a lot to thank them for.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Some people manage to play games AND do what you've done, or similar things.
for the love of pete, mod the man up
It seems like someone's figured out what was causing the bluescreens... from the MS forum thread:
I had an Eee PC with XP Home brought to me with this same problem. I rolled back KB977165, rebooted and the system worked fine. I reapplied KB977165 and the rest of the updates available at Microsoft Update, and the problem returned. I replaced %System32%\drivers\atapi.sys with a clean version from a XP SP3 distribution folder and rebooted... voila! Problem solved.
For reference, the SHA1SUMs of the atapi.sys files:
Non-working:
bb3e36ad0c8ed6daab38653ea4a942d74b9f4ff6
Working:
a719156e8ad67456556a02c34e762944234e7a44
If anyone wants to look at the non-working atapi.sys:
https://patrickwbarnes.com/pub/atapi.sys
I will be looking at this more in-depth. If I find anything more, it will be posted in a follow-up comment at the ISC:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8209
UPDATE :
I uploaded the non-working atapi.sys file to VirusTotal, and this is the result:
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/85aa49f587f69f30560f02151af2900f3dc71d39d1357727ab41b11ef828a7ff-1265925529
Apparently, this update problem is the result of an infection.
That blue screen you're seeing, they call it "Windows Azure."
Boot to Knoppix!?!? That's sooo next year.
I typically open the box, write down the random number on the card & go search for it online, then download the drivers.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
No problem with the particular patch in question but in both W2K and XP after applying all the February patches "mkunicode.dll" in the Haali splitter folder came up missing. I suspect it was related to the DirectShow patch. Fortunately I had it backed up because without it neither my OGV or MP4s would play.
They say ignorance is bliss... ;)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Ph.D. on a floppy? Should we get off your lawn?
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
...sifting through two apartment buildings' worth of trash to find it, and spent that entire night retyping it from scratch.
PhD "dissertation"? Normally one writes a thesis for a PhD, and a typical length is in the region of 50,000 words. I don't know about you, but that's way more than I can type in a night.
Here's a better story: Microsoft halts Windows Update distribution of security fix after blue-screen reports.
Developers may want to expand their markets to non-technical users so they have a larger paying customer base to fund innovation.
You can do it in 8 hours if you can type 100 words/minute, which isn't a terribly rare skill.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
When I was in college, a friend of mine who lived down the hall from me came to my door one day frantically knocking. She had stored the only copy of her PhD dissertation on a floppy disk, and the disk had gotten corrupted, and she didn't know what to do.
I poked around on it for a little while, trying out a disk sector editor I had to see if I could recover anything, and I couldn't. It was just lost, period.
She ended up going dumpster-diving. She had thrown away a printed hard copy the day before, and they hadn't taken the trash away yet. She was literally in the trash dumpster, sifting through two apartment buildings' worth of trash to find it, and spent that entire night retyping it from scratch.
I felt sorry for her, and I remember thinking, "Well, I guess that's one way to learn a lesson that you'll never forget..." I was also really glad that I wasn't her significant other, because you know who would have been sifting through that dumpster.
If this was Digg, I would Digg this.
Here's another story, with many comments: New Patches Cause BSoD for Some Windows XP Users.
They only get shoved down your throat if you have automatic updates turned on. Change the default and you don't have to deal with these messes every week.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
This happened on my work computer. I ran the Windows CD and pressed R at the first prompt. After logging into the installation I ran FIXBOOT and exited. After reboot Windows CHKDSK ran and fixed a few things then I was back up. Has anyone else tried this?
Because a lot of us DO play games.
If I didn't have other things to work on this week, I'd be playing Team Fortress 2 on my PC right now.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
There were 8 freaking OS security patches in this last patch Tuesday. It must have been a joy to track down the one update that was causing the problem (KB977165).
I have honest pangs of sympathy for the poor sucker that had to figure out that that one update was rendering infected systems unbootable.
This is why monoculture sucks. *Healthy* cultures are diverse. "Mono" doesn't enter into it. Pun very much intended.
--
Toro
No, but you can get off mine!
Get off my lawn!
zosxavius photography
Sure, that is if you ingest lots of LSD and enter a magickal state of streamed consciousness where you can pour your whole thesis out at a rate nearly faster than you can speak it. You know? That really brings back some memories....
zosxavius photography
If they actually found it in the trash (the gggp never states if it was actually found) then you're just copying words off the sheet... I did data entry for a few months, you can just turn off your brain and let your fingers do the thinking.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
GNU/Linux
This is why I never moved on past Windows 2000. You can't stop XP from phoning home, and getting your computer remotely messed up. I had a laptop that came with Vista, downgraded to XP, remembered why I used to never like XP back in the day, downgraded to Win2k, installed Lighthouse puppy 4.12c, for a taste of difference, dual boot with grub. Now lighthouse puppy is getting crappy too, as of 4.3. You can tell from the default green font color in the terminal - it burns blind spots in your eyes. And similar, as usual, retarded decidions. Look at knoppix, where it used to be at version 3.6, and where it is today. Messed up on purpose. But for now, old version of puppy Linux. Misses a whole lot of things you take for granted on unix, such as multiuser accounts. But it's superfast reinstall - just change grub's menu.lst, and start a new personal file. OS Reinstall complete by typing 3 letters into a config file - fresh system, as the personal file is layered over the OS file that does not change. I loves it. Can't say that about a Win2k reinstall, but at least Win2k doesn't need MS's approval to get reinstalled. The last one. So through better or worse, it's linux now, or something like it. And who knows what the future brings.
Bet she was REALLY glad that she had the printout, even if she tossed it. If she didn't...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
when you have a PHD you know enough to
A teach others
B get into real trouble
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
... to still be running Windows 2000. It received patches for the same vulnerabilities as XP, but it's running just fine.
Around the time that this popped up, I'd just finished wiping my PC and installing Win7.
For the curious - my bluescreen wouldn't stay put, it flashed up for about 1/3 a second and then rebooted the machine. I tried a repair install with the same result. At that point, I figured it wasn't worth pursuing (I knew I had some remnants of a spyware infection left on that machine) and decided to just put Win7 on it.
Follow these steps:
1. Boot from your Windows XP CD or DVD and start the recovery console (see this Microsoft article for help with this step)
Once you are in the Repair Screen..
2. Type this command: CHDIR $NtUninstallKB977165$\spuninst
3. Type this command: BATCH spuninst.txt
4. Type this command: systemroot
When complete, type this command: exit
Your computer should restart and everything should be back to normal.
That one really cracked me up. in TFA it says that file gets replaced by a newer version. Guess which anti-virus couldn't make heads or tails about waht to do with it?
:)
Microsoft's own...
MSE offered me to report it to MS, which I did
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
I was also really glad that I wasn't her significant other, because you know who would have been sifting through that dumpster.
But this proves that you thought about it, right? Right!? -nudge nudge-
That explains so much about the data I get back from the data entry people.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
When someone decides that there is money in getting non-techies onto Linux, they will be able to polish Linux into something really slick
I have tech-illiterate friends on FB raving about their Droid phones.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I know people could have many reasons for updating winxp but I found myself doing a TON of things without the need to update the machine at all for years. Just disable the automatic updates and update it manually if required. Use another browser than IE and that's it ... I don't even have an antivirus, I just have a virtual machine with xp and nod32 in case I need to test some files and that's it.
I never, never, NEVER have any problems.
I always email stuff to myself as an attachment as a backup - in addition to having OTHER backups also
. . . my Windows XP updates get pushed, pulled or shoved down my throat . . ..
No kidding, my section runs continuous long batch jobs (especially for End of Day processing). The last time the f...ing updates got pushed down and restarted our PCs, I had to tell the Windows Admin to f-off and reset my PCs to local accounts. The B-tard didn't even want to make exceptions for my PCs, and kept saying it was Company's regs, even after I explained how his Group Policies were killing our processing and forcing us to spend hours on roll back and re-running.
And no, I can't turn it the automatic updates off, if we logon to the Company's network, the Domain Group's Policies resets the automatic updates on.
... and what about using the Post Windows Update Restart prompt to avoid this mess? No, the damn prompt kept appearing "Always on top" at the most inconvient moments and the default action was to restart the PC.
Also doesn't state that the dissertation was finished that night, just that she spent the night typing it.
Perhaps she also spend the following 10 nights typing it as well.
For the millionth time:
10 Do regular backups
20 Test they work
30 Never trust windows
40 goto 10
It amazes me how smart people never learn from the mistakes of others.
I'm pretty sure he meant that his company network enforces a policy that instructs Windows to update - meaning he CAN'T change the setting. It also likely means he only gets updates that his company has released, so he might be spared from this one.
I guess she should have copied that floppy. That's what you get for listening to M.E. Hart.
We found this to be a problem when running old ATI drivers on a FireGL card, had to uninstall the drivers and install new versions, then the patch would stop bluescreening. ati2mtag.sys was the culprit in the minidumps I looked at, FWIW.
Have a netbook w/ XP on it. This came with NO CD/DVD drive, let alone a disk, NO USB install, NO external recovery method whatsoever. It DOES have a recovery option on the hard drive which is only conventionally accessible from the desktop Icon -once the system boots successfully- ,so if the system gets hosed, my only options are to a) get an outside tech to salvage it, somehow b)create some sort of external backup to rebuild the OS on my own, and salvage it, somehow c)exclaim in utter contempt "F* IT!" and load some other OS onto the thing, and salvage the whole situation, somehow.
Considering that I have a Linux distro on my desktop already and in light of this new update headache, option c is looking REALLY good to me right now. Heck, I might not even wait for the bloody BSOD as an excuse to zorch XP......neh, I'm feeling kinda lazy, I'll wait for it to self destruct first, which ought not to take all THAT long.
06:41:22 up 657 days, 19:06, 1 user, load average: 0.16, 0.18, 0.15
A gentoo box.
the x86 version if 240meg vs 150meg for puppy linux.. or even smaller from some other rescue disc. or you could get the latest hiren which has a live version of windows which some might find less intimidating. (i havent used windows for years as i am doing my phd in mathematical physics and mostly use mathematica/matlab (under linux) and fortran with ifort and imkl which are highly optimized. and emacs and ifort is just nicer under linux)
for the need to Backup, Backup, Backup........
Not true at all. it's a fairly well documented process and fairly standard to disable all user interaction with the update process using Group Policy on Windows Domains. Windows Sever Update Services(WSUS) goes out online and get's updates, your IT dept. deploys them to several test machines to ensure compatibility, and then the patch is approved in WSUS. the clients at the user level have no control over what is forced onto work machines.
Microsoft want to be ride of XP and what is the best way to do it? Break it!
I knew there still is a reason why I have never run windows updates since I installed SP2. I've had infinitely less outages due to virusus and malware than others have had due to windows updates. Namely none. Give me one good reason to update my installation of XP, and especially why I would want to put automatic updates on. I see no use. Really, I don't.
BSOD is imminent with or without the patch.
No need to buy a $50 book. If the place sells that book it will sell a cheaper magazine
Can we stop spouting useless generic statements. The above may be true for you but it isn't for many people. I find fixing problems on linux OSes is usually way easier (or at least possible), and I also think software installation is one the strengths of linux operating systems: Seeing "average" users find and install software on Windows is just scary.
So could we drop the cliches?
think I'll print this thread out first as there's some good recovery info... :)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Find ERD commander 2005
goto uninstall hotfixes
uninstall offending hotfix
Why you think you couldn't accomplish all that and play games as well ?
It's "should we get off your lawn, SIR"!
The whole thing seems fishy if you ask me. Likely a sly way to get all the non-computer-literate folks to upgrade from XP to say, Windows 7 (or Apple, if they learn their lesson the first time around).
It astounds me utterly that people continue to use machines that they know have been compromised after they just remove the most obvious of the damage, or even without doing anything at all. Somebody else had complete control and they still type credit card numbers on the things.
So put this down as a "me too" post - wiping the lot and starting again is the only real way to fix it.
I just want to make sure we keep a record of this story. We can show it to the next guy when he slams Linux for breaking his video/sound after an update.
While security updates are important, I do believe in that old saying: "if it works, don't mess with it".
too many games claim to be pc games, when they in fact is windows games only.. how is the EU commission NOT doing anything about it.
I don't think there's anything magical on an NTFS partition and that if you could copy all the files exactly (including metadata) you should be able to get a good, restorable backup.
My guess, anyway.
I think rsync using xattr and maybe acl copying is required, and then perhaps ntfs-3g's secaudit tool for the rest of the metadata.
Use a friends computer to download the latest Ubuntu and burn to a cd (slow speed), then boot from that CD on your HP computer and it will let you gain access to your hard-drive for your PhD dissertation files... it will even let you edi tthem using OpenOffice that runs straight from the CD...
30 should be "never trust computers", any OS can fail; any application can fail; any hardware can fail.
Data corruption isn't reserved to windows, i've seem OSX eat it's fs too, hell, i've even witnessed data corruption on linux & big iron
This system is my voice and my window to the world
My first gut reaction says I'd want to have a redundant one, so that if one gets hosed I can use the other to call out to the world and ask for help.
There is no Linux availability at all (oh how I wish).
Can you run control Linux running in a virtual machine? Is the IR eye tracking like a separate input device (but how would the applications know to handle it?), or is there some software translating your eye movements into mouse motion and key presses? If so, maybe you can drive a VM with it, or use Synergy (software key/vid/mouse switch) to "leap" over to a Linux machine with it?
I must admit I don't think I can imagine very well what your situation is like. So maybe my ideas are all useless. In that case, I hope you can see past that and realise I'm doing this not just in a vain attempt at having my knowledge be useful and me being "the hero who saves the day" (although I must admit to that playing a role), but also because I genuinely hope you get more value out of your time.
/tinfoilhat
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Various Linux distros perked my interest as a refreshing alternative to Windows, but ever since Mac OS X came along, that has more than satisfied my needs. Ubuntu does look promising, but as you point out the money just isn't there.
Are there any Linux distros which charge a significant amount of money (e.g. $100) for their use? I'm thinking that a Linux distro would have to be commercialised in order for it to be polished and user-friendly enough to compete with Windows and OS X.
Microsoft will probably release another patch for that exploit that doesn't cause BSODs sometime in the future. :/
And unless people you don't trust have limited access accounts on your computer, you should be fine anyways, because the offending patch fixes a local privilege escalation issue, not a remote exploit.
After years of not using a signature, I am going to make one to say the following: Fuck Beta
Having heard about this, I didn't install any of the pending updates on my WinXP x64 machine which I was a scant couple days from installing Windows 7 on. Tonight, just as I was getting ready to do the do, the WinXP installation stopped booting... I guess the update snuck its way in. Luckily I was in a position to simply move up the install a couple hours. I had been hoping to copy the data off the original system drive while it was still operational, but instead I just took the drive out and I'll copy the stuff off later.
God I hate Windows updates. They're always doing SOMETHING to automatically screw us good, whether by accident or not...
Could have been worse though; if I weren't in the process of getting ready to reinstall, I would have been completely up the creek.
Oh well. Windows 7 install is chugging along, I guess I'll go play some King of Fighters on the arcade cabinet I pissed away my tax refund on last week. :)
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
You mean, like ln -sf thesis thesis_backup?
That's an excellent solution, because it keeps the backup synchronized with the original automatically.
I herd u like updating, so I updated your updates so you can update while ur updating.
At the bottom of the
This patch made LOTS of Windows 98 computers become slow as being unusable and/or enjoy frequent BSODs.
This "update" ate my boss' laptop & killed at least two of the workstations at the office.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Well, if your dissertation is below 1,474,560 characters (about 350-550 pages)... which I strongly hope for those who have to read it... ;)
Of course with MS Word, you’d be happy to fit a single plain text page on a floppy nowadays. ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Does it also write, "please upgrade to Windows 7"?
IE - if your PC has been compromised, maybe it is doing so via a small hidden daemon that hides itself by making unauthorized calls to the kernel at specific addresses. By patching the kernel, those addresses now do something else. SO when the exploit app mucks with them in the kernel, your machine locks up.
Just 100% theory but I have been in this industry way too long now to dismiss anything as impossible.
Data corruption isn't reserved to windows, i've seem OSX eat it's fs too, hell, i've even witnessed data corruption on linux & big iron
True but missing the point. These problems are very likely on windows and very unlikely on linux or mainframes.
> Ph.D. on a floppy?
Sure, no problem.
A typical doctoral dissertation is less than a hundred pages double-spaced, so it'll fit on a 360K floppy even if you do it in XML. If you've got a high-density floppy, you could use RTF.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
They dont learn from their own mistakes. I have one friend working on her 3rd PhD.... she still loses stuff to never backing something up.
ALL SHE HAS TO DO IS PUSH THE BUTTON ON THE HARD DRIVE... and it starts the backup software. She cant be bothered with pushing that button before bed.
I just look at her and say," Lack of education is not your excuse... You're simply dumb."
And it is simply being dumb. because she KNOWS that pushing that magical button will make it all better, she makes a conscious decision to NOT push that button. Which equates to stupidity.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not so sure, a girl who dumpster dives you can probably just about live with, but a girl who doesn't backup her data??
I was also really glad that I wasn't her significant other, because you know who would have been sifting through that dumpster.
Hah! Women, amirite?
In what way are they "very likely" on windows? Seriously, i dispise the POS just as much as the next linux user, but in all the years of (proffesional) use i've never experienced data corruption at all that wasn't related to hw failure, i've actually seen HFS+/OSX screw up more often then NTFS/Windows.
A long while ago, a file of Windows haiku was floating around. I don't remember any but this
Windows XP crashed
I am the Blue Screen of Death
No one hears you scream
5) Copy ALL important files to the USB drive (probably safest to copy your entire user directory, if your USB drive is big enough.
Copy ALL important files to the USB drive (probably safest to copy your entire user directory, that command is) /C //moves to the c directory //retrieves the media in the current directory
cd
rm *
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
When I was in college, a friend of mine who lived down the hall from me came to my door one day frantically knocking. She had stored the only copy of her PhD dissertation on a floppy disk, and the disk had gotten corrupted, and she didn't know what to do.
I poked around on it for a little while, trying out a disk sector editor I had to see if I could recover anything, and I couldn't. It was just lost, period.
She ended up going dumpster-diving. She had thrown away a printed hard copy the day before, and they hadn't taken the trash away yet. She was literally in the trash dumpster, sifting through two apartment buildings' worth of trash to find it, and spent that entire night retyping it from scratch.
I felt sorry for her, and I remember thinking, "Well, I guess that's one way to learn a lesson that you'll never forget..." I was also really glad that I wasn't her significant other, because you know who would have been sifting through that dumpster.
tell that idiot with the Phd disertation problem, to get another hard drive and use his original as a secondary and drag the disertation from the bad drive to the good drive...simple as that. The problem is only in the windows settings. Not in his documents. Also can use the Software: ( Powersuite Pro 2008 ) to recover data.
From the comments I've read, it seems that it's only the Windows XP boxes that were infected with virus and other nasties that are BSODing.
In other words, the weak systems have died. If it wasn't for cases like the PhD dude who lost his thesis, I would call it actually a good thing since those guys will be forced to refresh their Windows install and hopefully make it one less zombie on our intertubes.
AC
My father's computer blue screened after January's security updates. I was only able to get around to fixing it last weekened. It turned out to be a bad Nvidia video driver. Microsoft had replaced the driver from the NVidia website for his dual-head video card with some older generic NVidia driver. Went to NVidia and downloaded an even newer driver, and the system works again.
Oddly enough I only had TEN items (not 11) to download during Tuesday's updates and all my computers have been working fine since then.
I think this might be a ruse, only real techies know they can get out of it, the rest of them might think they have to upgrade to vista or 7 and do so. Nice one M$, I really hate that....I wonder if it was done on purpose...
"From the comments I've read, it seems that it's only the Windows XP boxes that were infected with virus and other nasties that are BSODing"
Where does it say that only infected Windows X/P boxes are BSODing ?
> PhD "dissertation"? Normally one writes a thesis for a PhD
Two ways of saying the same thing. The word "thesis" in this context is short for "thesis paper", i.e., a dissertation written in support of a thesis statement.
> I don't know about you, but that's way
> more than I can type in a night.
I'm guessing the story is a few years old.
Someone who is accustomed to retyping material from extant manuscripts (not very common these days but still a widespread practice in the eighties) and thus is well-practiced at typing quickly and has a halfway decent keyboard to type on (also not real common anymore, but the Model M was very popular at one time) can generally do at least 60wpm, and a lot of people can do more. *Good* typists can do 120+. If we split the difference for the sake of estimation, 90wpm, with only short breaks, comes to about four and a half thousand words an hour, so a fifty-thousand word dissertation might take about twelve hours to type. You could only do this if you were *accustomed* to spending several hours typing every day, of course, and by the time you finished your hands would be cramping up and your arms would feel like they were going to fall off and you wouldn't want to SEE a keyboard again for a week. It would be the kind of feat you would never want to have to repeat, EVER again in your life.
And there would be typos, and you wouldn't catch all of them, so you'd be turning in an imperfect copy.
But it's theoretically doable.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
This is finally the update that will actively and effectively secure Windows once and for all!
Thank you MS.
Too bloody right.
Ubuntu might make it if they learn a lot more of MS's undoubted knowledge of what (the vast majority of) users know & want.
atapi.sys is infected on non-functioning systems. The patched files try to access it and because of the infection they trigger a crash.
The last time there were blue screens after a patch it was also because people got infected. Not really a Microsoft issue.
i've actually seen HFS+/OSX screw up more often then NTFS/Windows.
Really?
Because in my use of HFS and HFS+ on Macs since it was released (MFS was the filesystem on the original Macs. HFS came about later, and HFS+ later still), I have never lost a file that wasn't attributed to HD failure (and that happened only once).
My machines are running ok but I thought I'd look to see if KB977165 which is reported to cause the blue screens was on any of them. It was installed on one machine and not on another. So I thought I'd check a few more things that others say may be causing the problem.
It has been suggested that atapi.sys in the system32/drivers folder might be rootkitted by the update. I compared the SHA-1 hash of atapi.sys on both machines and they were the same (A719156E8AD67456556A02C34E762944234E7A44) so, apparently, update KB977165 didn't change that file in my case.
Some people are saying that atapi.sys is infected with a rootkit. I ran scanned the file through Jotti.com and it found nothing. I also scanned the file at VirusTotal.com and only eSafe reported a problem as follows:
eSafe 7.0.17.0 2010.02.11 Win32.Rootkit
I think this is a false positive since I have identical copies of atapi.sys on both machines and both show the same result on eSafe.
It's possible, I suppose, that I was rooted by something other than the Windows updates but, so far, Sysinternals Rootkit Revealer has shown nothing suspicious.
Do these results agree with anybody elses?
Its that Mac ports (generally) take ages to come out, and perform awful because the rather amateur devhouses that create them are useless. See Feral Interactive, Aspyr Media, etc.
Having said that, I haven't played computer games in a decade at least so it never mattered much to me.
I've worked for 9 years in a support role for mac & windows, HFS+ and HFS aren't all that stable, however, recovery tended to be abit eaiser with HFS(+) compared to NTFS.
I'm not going to claim however that HFS was solely to blame, it's always possible that corruption occurred due the ocasional kernel panic on OSX, or bombs in the old days or applications doing something wonky, but it happened, and more often then the (more numerous) windows installations.
In the end though, it doesn't really matter, in most circumstances the corruption wasn't fatal and we had good backups, and there is no such thing as a perfect computer
Also, while command line may be faster than GUI, GUI is easier and here's why: if I want to do some task, I can look at the toolbars and in the menus to fins an item that looks like what I need to do (for example, if I want to find a file, I'll look for a button or menu item named "Search", "Find" or something like that.
Nevermind the command line, that makes you a computer expert:
http://xkcd.com/627/
Say you typed non stop at 60 words per minute, that would take you 833 minutes or about 14 hours. Just about possible - if you started at 6 in the evening you'd be done by 8 the next morning...
Alternatively, in that situation surely you could find some friends to share the load?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Did she keep the disk in her handbag together with her cell phone?
If yes, then she is a moron. The speaker is bad for your data, but the vibrate function is worse.
ls | grep foo
all anyone needs to do is read a man page. There is really no excuse for someone to be tech illiterate nowadays, it's usually just refusal to learn, and we shouldn't cater to it.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
This is dick-waving, plain and simple. If someone has fun playing games, then they should play games, not feel guilty because of an absurd artificial obligation to fulfil some kind of imaginary "checklist for life".
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
And maybe also because they get a lot of testers that help them find bugs, making a better software which can attract more users/customers...
PhD "dissertation"? Normally one writes a thesis for a PhD, and a typical length is in the region of 50,000 words. I don't know about you, but that's way more than I can type in a night.
Actually, you typically write a thesis for a Masters degree...for a PhD, you typically write a dissertation, which is a fair bit larger than a thesis.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
"Personally, I could care less if my mom uses Linux."
It's "couldn't care less".
Thanks for contributing to the nonsensical bastardization of the English language.
You get this problem if your atapi.sys was malware-infected.
Solution: Replace atapi.sys with a clean copy.
More info:
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=8209
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Computers don't come with those any more.
And, although a few vendors ship with instructions for creating a boot disk, hardly anyone actually follows those instructions.
How much less could you care?
In the UK a dissertation is the term used for a taught masters or undergrad final project. Thesis is the term used for the document resulting from a research masters or a PhD
No problems here - but I declined to let Microsoft take "Advantage" of me. Three XP machines...where did that Vista sticker go - it came with this laptop running Linux.
If accepting WIndows Genuine Advantage leads to the Blue Screen of Death...I would say it's time for another class action lawsuit!
>Which equates to stupidity.
Or self-destructive behavior. Therapy might help that. Or it might not...
Same here in Australia.
"The question is why would developers want to expand their market share among the non-technical users? "
Because non-technical users are domain experts, and they can add content to your system.
The trick is providing ways for non-technical domain experts to contribute that content without breaking the technical bits.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
At least one damn; that's the Planck quantum of empathy, right?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I only had one user have this issue in my office. This is mostly a result of most other users having Vista or Win7 on their computers by now. When I first saw the issue, my exact thoughts were: "what the hell?"
I was in the process of doing my usual troubleshooting, but went home for the day.
I happened upon this article and it hit me: "This is the exact same issue I'm having... I wonder what the chances are..."
When I got back to the office, I tried the first of the commands listed in the fix. It worked. That meant that the updates were there, and that more than likely they were a problem. After finishing all the commands, the computer now runs like a top! I owe that "maxyimus" user a great deal of thanks for the stress relief.
Do I blame Microsoft for this? Not entirely... I think greater testing is required before they release patches such as the one they did, but apart from that, I'm just thankful the fix was an easy one.
In the US, it's the other way around, so I imagine that is what they were referring to.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.