I found the installation of SP2 initially annoying with its questions of applications trying to access the Internet and its re-locking down of Outlook Express. For the saavy home user, the upgrade will not hurt. For the novice user, Microsoft - get the phone rooms ready! Barring any really creative solutions by software vendors the bumps will be minor in corporate environments.

Of course the MS firewall will not block the OS trying to 'phone home' for any of its covert dialogues.

I just downloaded the SP but I'm still at work at the moment. I'll put it on my laptop tonight... after setting up a restore point and backing up the PC.

Downloaded and installed...cha ching, it works just fine! I guess I can sleep at night now.

Just downloaded and I can already see that there are tons of kinks that need to be worked out. I advise most people to wait several weeks before downloading for an easy installation process.

Installed SP2. It breaks DataCAD's hardlock and possibly other Aladdin hardlocked programs. It don't like hlvdd.dll with a parallel hardlock.

Downloaded and installed on a Tablet PC... handwriting recognition improved quite a bit. Haven't tested the firewall yet but I expect I'll hit hving to "allow" all sorts of apps for the first week or so. I imaged the hard drive prior to installation... just in case.

Thanks, guys, for sharing your experiences. Feel free to check back in if you have more to say after you've run it for a while.

Also, I'm sure people would want to read any further SP2-related advice some of the more technical folks might have for the home users who are going to be installing it in the coming weeks.

Have been running sp2 (beta( for 2 months no problems, thought it was a dream come true. Alas,
Microsoft downloaded final sp2 to me today, thank heaven I have GoBack installed. My msn messenger wouldn't work, Norton messenger protect wouldn't work, not that it made much difference. No matter how many times i clicked my desktop icons nothing would start., although in all fairness some programs did initialize after about 3 minutes, good grief.. and restart the computer, a lost cause without a complete power down. Restored system back to before sp2 installed and everything working beautifully with sp2 (beta), as usual Microsoft is going to use the public as a test bed, for their failure to sufficiently test their products.

SP2, my, my, my -- why is it that Microsoft gets so much press about deliving a product a day late and a dollar short that has almost no value added and doesn't address the real issues like security, performance and so on...

Well -- it's no different in the transition from 95, to 98, to ME to 2000, XP -- a series of disappointments as regular as a list of Fibonnaci numbers.

Whereas Ballmer and Gates and their astroturfers and 'paid average Joes' are out there decrying every tiny little nook and cranny -- even though the 2.6 kernel -- a huge and major release with sweeping increases in speed, performance and stability -- was delivered working with one or two minor release upgrades ahead of schedule!

I've loaded SP2 onto three of my main machines (two workstations and my laptop). Thus far, everything is smooth. We think things are a little quicker on the Laptop, but that's probably wishful thinking. Thus far (2 days in) all systems are still running fine and no issues to report. Were that every SP installation so easy.

I've installed SP2 on three machines (two at work and one at home) and the whole process was as smooth as silk. I'm very pleased. Good job on this one Microsoft.

We have started to Pilot XP SP2 within our corporation, and started to use the new GPO's to configure the Firewall. So far everything is executing fine, we are goping to open the pilot to more users as the weeks go on.

Just loaded up Sp2 yesterday. Everything was running fine except those print ballons. If I leave one up to long it bombs exploader.

i am glad i have backups...my IDE disks dont seem to function anymore after installing SP2

I've been running the beta for several weeks and downloaded the final Tuesday. No major problems to report.

My CPU is an Athlon 64 so I've been able to test Data Execution Protection. I've run into several major commercial apps that cause a dialouge to pop up asking you to decide wether to bypass DEP or not. I have a feeling a lot of software vendors are going to have to re-write some code to keep this from happening and confusing users.

Also the firewall caused my corporate VPN connection from home to fail. Bypassing the firewall fixed this easily. I'm sure corporate IT helpdesks will get calls about things like these.

I had been running SP2 BETA with no problems and was impressed about how smooth the transition was. However, SP2 final was installed last night automatically and after a good 4 hours of trying to get networking back up and running again, its uninstalled.

Prepare for jammed telephone support lines :D

apt-get install sp2

To refute some of the ignorance, SP2 does in fact tighten up security to windows XP in a major way. As far as some of the users who had SP2beta, the problem is the beta not the SP2, and thats what you get for downloading the beta in the first place. SP2 turns on your firewall but its true intention is to protect my grandmother, took me all of 5 minutes to revert back to the way it was. It even tests for antivirus. I have found that sp2 does lengthen the boot time a bit. Oh and you have to redo all of your themes and boot screens. Those jerks...

Probably the most comprehensive knowledgebase of XP Service Pack 2 install issues can be found at the internet storm center ( http://isc.sans.org/xpsp2.php )

After my XP SP2 install, I stopped using IE for my HTTP client and Outlook for my e-mail client and now I have no more problems with Active X or embedded scripts in e-mail exploits. My box is about 80% more secure now with those two products eliminated. Otherwise, everything else is working fine.

Thanx for the hard work.

Installed SP2 on my work computer, WinXP Pro, and my two home PC's, both XP Pro as well.

Install was smooth as ever, systems running great, pop-up blocker is great.

I turned off the firewalls on all 3 since the boxes are natted.

Disaster. Whole lab froze up with the network rate
limiter. Falling back to Windows 2000, since it can keep patch updates rolling.

Installed SP2 on my main work system. Now it won't boot AT ALL. Not even safe mode. It stops on agp440.sys. Removed my AGP card. Still nothing. Not happy.

XP SP2 wouldn't install. I read through the EULA and researched what terms like "quiet enjoyment" and "quiet possession" mean, for example. And I found these terms of Microsoft's EULA to be unacceptable. So I said no and it wouldn't install.

The terms of the MS EULA need to be negotiable. I just refuse to give access to my box to alter software at anytime without my permisson, for example. These guys have gone too far -- control freaks even. I guess I'll find a different OS to install.

Will SP3 include cutters to cut your ethernet cable with. I know this might be an inconvieniance for some users but the increase in security would be well worth it.

get a clue

XP SP2 ruined our network. We installed it late last night and it caused a huge fire in our datacenter. Over $10,000,000 in damages so far and we still haven't found the cat.

On one system during install aspi.sys could not be written until I
renamed the existing file.

No problems on other system.

Very nice, I also noticed the slightly longer bootup time, although it did nothing to fix the just plain weird problem I've been having with my desktop since about a week ago... no right-click on the desktop, and you know in the "display" control panel applet, the tab that says "desktop"? That tab is gone. Just gone. In fact, it took me a minute to remember that there used to be another tab there. Only way for me to change desktops now is to revert to a previously saved theme... I also personally think that that security center thing should have an easier-to-find "stop bugging me" button.

Mostly, though, it seems to be operating exactly the same as SP1 was. Of course, I don't use IE or OE, and apparantly a lot of the obvious changes were to those programs. Also, a lot of the "help me" links so far seem to link to broken pages... first example I remember is the one at the bottom of the configuration box for "Windows Firewall"

sp2 installed and working like a champ. How people are having problems, I'll never know.

-Bannerboxes
http://www.bannerboxes.com

I tried to install the service pack on my Linux box but it didn't work. Can anyone help?

Clients across the hall had an overzealous Dell background app install SP2 without them knowing it (since it was marked "critical"). Hosed their entire reporting system and prevented mapped drives from being accessed correctly. Disabled their firewall and things were right as rain again after I remapped things, but they lost a good 6 hours of the day trying to get things running with the non-help from Dell. Marking this as a critical update was a bad move IMO.

Installed SP2 a few days ago. Initally I did not notice any problems, however, the service pack breaks Creative Organizer and Playcenter when being used with a Nomad Jukebox 3. When clicking on either cd or nomad tabs the apps freeze (along with the system) for about 20 seconds unfreeze for about 1 sec and repeat. There is no way to close them without a hard reset. Uninstalled SP2 and all is fine again.

Although I disagree with the EULA I gave it a try anyway. With 650 megs free, it took SP2 more than 10 minutes to figure out that I had not enuf free space on the C:-drive.

No need to uninstall it! That's a great feature, thanks...

650 megs is enuf for Knoppix, so there is no need to install SP2 anyway.

SP2 really breaks terminal services on client desktops. NO GOOD!

Dave

I got SP2 from the peer to peer site http://sp2torrent.com/ before the curs at the Bastion of Mediocrity slapped their web hosts with a DMCA take-down notice. Naturally I checked the md5 checksum before installing it on a non-critical PC. All my PCs are non-critical of course, since Mac OS X and Linux computers are for critical work.

Installation of SP2 went fine. But the SP2 strategy is to scare the bejeezus out of the user by questioning anything that uses the network. It is popup city and it's Windows own pop-ups so IE does not block them. The additional time installing, testing, and dealing with every windows pop-up nag will not reduce the TOC of Windows XP of course.

The new windows security icon on my system tray tells me I don't have any anti-virus software installed. Excuse me? Why is this necessary now that I have SP2? I STILL NEED TO HAVE AV SOFTWARE AFTER INSTALLING SP2? But I have Ad-Aware and SpyBot installed, I am behind a firewall, I know better than to do Email on the computer, and I use FireFox for browsing, so where is my exposure?

Finally, given that SP2 is about 266 Megabytes, all of those people on Dial-up are going to need those CD-ROM installers.

That's 266 Megabytes of technological garbage. Better to go to CheapBytes.com and order up a Knoppix CD and put this nonsense behind us!

Sincerely,

Johannes Rexx

I cannot believe this, total disaster!

First, I installed sp2 on my BDC server. It crashed and will not reboot. Now the whole data center is crashing. The cables to the routers seem to be catching on fire! Too late, the building started on fire now and I don't know what to do! Oh my GF called just after installation and broke up with me and I think she killed my cat too.

Sheesh, you people need to get a life or a clue, SP2 installed (6 different machines so far), working great. Thanks MS!

Would not attempt such a large download with broadband.

The download and install went OK with only one minor problem.

Outlook Express did would not start. Mutiple attempts at solutions suggested on MS user groups were unsuccessful.

Needed to reset a registry setting that I had reset to change the default install location to the D:\ drive and reinstall SP2.

My personal laptop installation whent fine. No hangups.

Fails with Intel prescott cpu.
Every install Ive tryed with a box with a prescott it fails, what gives? If you disable the L1/L2 it boots fine but SLOW. This is a major show stopper or I am the only one with prescotts haveing a problem.

After SP2 my computer will no longer restart or shutdown completely. I heard the hard drive shut down but it's still got a display and power.

I installed it on my IBM Thinkpad. It's getting old and I was kinda worried it would catch fire. Last night I was getting read errors from a previously fine hard drive and these spine tingling'ly bad sounds that kinda sound like normal seeking, but 100 times as loud. I put my computer to bed last night and tried it again tonight. The next read error I get, and blammo... back it goes.

The linux partition on the computer works beautifully... good job Gentoo.

Oh and I could not log into it from work until I disabled the firewall and gave it some TLC with a bat. That may be why the hard drive is messed, but im not sure.

Take a gaze at the squawking over at dslreports dot com (if you've the stomach).

What I've gleaned so far:

*The startup progress bar has changed color.

*People are downloading this thing from all corners of the globe.

*Turf wars are breaking out right & left over as the mods dick-size.

*The startup progress bar has changed color.

*People that have had a problem are sub human.

*If you don't bow to Gates you're a sodomite.

*The startup progress bar has changed color.

*I haven't installed an MS OS SP since NT sp3, and I don't even HAVE a progress bar when it the os boots.

*I've come to a final conclusion: the human experiment is an abysmal failure.

I had a heavily modifed version of XP pro with sp1 running, and it destroy my computer.

I had the OS locked down, was using Aston Shell for a gui, and had some serivces turned off. The resulsts were:

first everything seemed fine, then I noticed that my network adapter was gone, didnt show up in network connetions either, was still in device manager, and an ipconfig showed it was still there.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling it, that caused my computer to go into what I can only refer to as a spiral of death, system resotre wouldnt open, I couldnt uninstall it, then after further failed attempts, it BSOD on boot.

Slipstreamed SP2 into my SP1 Original XP Pro disc.

1. Wouldn't boot (might be something I did in the slipstream, no biggy).
2. Clear install... After I got it to start the install, instant blue screen. It doesn't like my SATA drives, and I don't have a floppy drive on my machine to get it to load the SATA drivers from.
3. Had to ghost to an old ATA drive, install on that, load the SATA drivers then ghost back.
4. Of course everything in between didn't work all to well, install took over 6h (on a fast system).

I am a Onsite Consultant for a large Number of Australian Companies, I downloaded and installed it in advance to validate it's stability, I must say I was very dissipointed when the Machine failed to boot after installing SP2 with a black screen, attempted to restore from System Restore and failed, after getting into Safe Mode and uninstalling it It still failed to boot, thus I am not very Impressed as there is no information concerning how or why it failed to boot in either the logs or online I was forced to Rebuild the machine from scratch.

Tried installing it with 2 GBs free on the harddrive. Never told me I didn't have enough room, but half way through the install the error indicating the harddrive was full popped up and the install crashed. The computer rebooted to a blue screen of death saying winserv didn't exist.

After repairing the installation and making room on the hard drive, 3.5 GB free, I reinstalled it and it worked. My problem with it now is it will not recognize that my Norton's is working and current -- I merely shut off the AV monitoring.

Downloaded and installed it on 2 machines:

Machine #1: P4 2.4G 512Ram XP-Pro installation went E-Z.

Machine #2: P4 3.0G 1GigRam XP-Pro installation caused system to reboot every few minutes by sending some sort of RPC call to the computer to shutdown. I thought I had the Blaster or Lasser virus that resurrected somehow after the service pack, but I never found anything using standalone virus scanners.

Tried multiple to go into Safe mode and UNinstall SP2 but the system kept hanging. PLUS! I had to goto the command prompt every few minutes to avoid shutingdown by using the command "shutdown -a".

Eventually, used BART-PE to CD-Boot from to recover some files. Luckily I had backups and 2 hard drive partitions (unfortunately some of the backup data was a few months old ). Needless to say, I had a bad experience.

I DL'ed SP2 off P2P and installed on my personal computer. First off, it doesnt recognize Norton 2004 as an anti-virus software... So I ignore that... it bothers me a few times about AIM and MSN and Yahoo messengers... thats fine, every good* firewall should do some configuring... But the problem comes in when i try to use P2P apps.. the firewall cant seem to pass the traffic properly.

The Connection drops roughly every 6 hours. It isnt for long.. maybe 30 seconds. I wouldnt install it on anything that is mission critcal yet.

It's horrible - I ran the Defrag program that ships with it (XP Pro), rebooted and found my disk totally corrupt. Most executables got corrupted, file system security settings went for a toss and it now doesn't boot any more.

Installed on my Shuttle PC (with a Prescott P4), which was previously running XP Pro with SP1 and all hotfixes. After rebooting at the end of the install, my PC would no longer boot up. I would get the WinXP logo and the status bar would just lock up solid at (what I would guess) about a third of the way through startup.

Had to recover my system by doing a repair (twice, as the first repair just left my PC in a reboot loop).

What is going on with this SP???

We got this from our netscreen vendor, we also got a warning from cisco to advise people not to install XP2 for their vpn customers as well:

Windows XP SP2 incompatibility with Juniper Networks NetScreen SSL-VPN products
Products Affected All Juniper Networks NetScreen SSL-VPN products and supported versions of IVE OS software
Platforms Affected IVE OS 2.x
IVE OS 1.x
IVE OS 3.x
NetScreen SSL VPN
IVE OS 4.x

Revision Number 1
Issue Date 2004-08-11

Where can I get Windows? Can you get it on a new computer and does it have the Internet?

It's really not that bad. Ran the beta for a couple of months and it worked well. The big test for us will be NAI's ePolicy Orchestrator. Initial rumors had it not working, but my thought is the ports can be opened up on the Firewall over GPO.

The pop up blocker is the shizzle; kudos on the reminder to tell people what it is when the first pop up is blocked.

--pete

Installed fine on workstation and laptop. Have no problems Cisco VPN over Wi-Fi on my laptop. Broke Citrix ICA client, but Java version still works.

Installed on my home PC. It corrupted my video drivers. I would boot the machine and get nothing but a black screen when Windows tried to boot. Then my monitor ligh turned from green to amber (no signal). Hey Microsoft, I think you should put this one back in the oven, it's not done yet.

Installed SP2 on a Del precision 530 Dual 1.7G Xeons, 1.5GB ram. No probs detected at first, smooth install. Running tasklist gives me an RPC server unavailable error, and System Information reports a network error connecting to WMI. I've tried disabling and turning off the xp firewall, no fix yet. Everything else (normal apps) work fine. May uninstall SP2.

I downloaded the WIN Xp SP2 about 3 days ago. I installed it over a fresh install of XP with SP1. I already had DX 9c installed, but it did install WMP9. But I am having just one problem, playing high definition movies from the microsoft website. I don't mean the 1080i type, cause my computer isn't fast enough to do that. When I play the movies I see distortions in the movie on the top of the screen. It was not doing it before the SP2 installation, so I do belive that thats whats causing it. If anybody knows a way to fix this please contact me on yahoo my ID or SN is jdogg2183. my system----AMD Athlon 2000+ @1670MHz, 512MB DDR@333MHz, Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 128MB DDR, 52X32x52x16xSONY cdrw/Dvd, running two monitors gateway 17" and Toshiba 27" flat screen TV through s-video.

SP2 on my Dell laptop went great.

I installed it on a home machine and it will no longer boot. It gets to the startup screen and freezes.

On restart I get the option of safe mode and such, only the keyboard won't work.

The keyboard works to get into the BIOS.

So, I figured that XP USB keyboard support got dorked somehow.

PS/2 keyboard?

No dice.

I'm glad I keep data on separate drives. I am going to have to lay down the OS and all of my apps AGAIN.

I really do like XP, but this is quite upsetting and unnecessary.

Doug

I have not installed SP2 yet, and from what I read, I dont think I will, I do not want to be reminded every time I boot, that the firewalls not on and the virus checker, I use norton firewall and the virus blocker in Fix-it 5, which are good, if there no way of turning of this nagg, then sorry microsoft, bill gates can stick it up his a---.

Everybody's got to be a comedian here...sigh

I've not yet installed it, but I'm sure all will be okay when I do. Its not rocket science to figure out any problems that arise.

And if my machine won't boot up, I won't cry and moan like all the rest of the apple eating, linux freaks, because I will have a backup of any important data like every responsible person should.

Microsoft is trying their best...it isn't their fault that the world is filled with lovely people who write viruses and hack anything on the network.

My advice to everyone is not to have automatic update on dispite what Microsoft tells you, the first thing to do is to make a image of your system partition, Drive Image is a ideal program for this, then download and install SP2 when you want to, like six months time when all the bugs are out. it seems to me that they have gone over the top on trying to protect your system, there are companies that specialise in this, so if you have a firewall and virus program from one of these companies, you will be protected, you dont need all this in windows as well. I wonder if this SP2 has repaired some of the bugs in XP, like the windows not remembering the last settings, which drives you mad, I hope it has. but if you cant stop the nagg that pops up each time you boot, reminding you that you have not got the firewall on, this will drive you to total madness. sit back and wait, dont be in a rush to put SP2 on.

I just installed the service pack 2 and was not at all pleased with some of the problems that it caused. First of all, if you try to go to the windows update website, you have to download updated software. The update software would not download onto my computer, due to a "Firewall" being active. The firewall that came with sp2 had to be disabled. Another problem that i have found is that it keeps on telling me every time a program tries to access the internet. So i turned the firewall off and found that it kept alerting me that the firewall was turned off. The firewall had no extra settings that would allow you to turn off the alerts, and it has driven me mad. After getting through the firewall problems, i found that windows also now warns you every five seconds that you have automatic updates turned off. WTF? On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, i give SP2 a -1,093,987,234,982.77. Don't download if you can help it!!

I just installed the service pack 2 and was not at all pleased with some of the problems that it caused. First of all, if you try to go to the windows update website, you have to download updated software. The update software would not download onto my computer, due to a "Firewall" being active. The firewall that came with sp2 had to be disabled. Another problem that i have found is that it keeps on telling me every time a program tries to access the internet. So i turned the firewall off and found that it kept alerting me that the firewall was turned off. The firewall had no extra settings that would allow you to turn off the alerts, and it has driven me mad. After getting through the firewall problems, i found that windows also now warns you every five seconds that you have automatic updates turned off. WTF? On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, i give SP2 a -1,093,987,234,982.77. Don't download if you can help it!!

In reply to "reader's" response slamming all of us microsoft hating, "apple eating, linux freaks," microsoft sucks. There is nothing that you can say that would make us feel any different. If microsoft were really trying, then they would create features that gave us control of our own computer's. Its not even like their service pack did much. It doesn't come with it's own antivirus, so they obviously do not care that people are writing viruses. It also closes alot of the control that most people want over their pc. That is why people like apple, linux, and unix. They have more security than windows. They're more controllable than windows. And they are more stable and powerful than windows. The only reason microsoft is still accepted today is because they wrote the operating system for the first operational pc over twenty years ago. They also charge for their software wich makes people like it better. We are perfectly justified in our hatred of microsoft and their pc applications. They almost do a better job of developing applications for the mac anyway!!

Well well well.

I just installed this sp and my first impressions. Good on security. Everythigns running smoothly, for now. Although my P2P client dosent work, hmhmhm thank goodness for my other pc! Which i wont be installing this sp on that. When microsoft can get it to properly handle traffic then i might

I got prescott problems as well!
Other systems ok.

i installed SP1 + SP2 the other day and had horendous network problems. the general windows security center notifying my every ten seconds untill i caved and enabled auto update and the firewall, it didnt recognise Norton i was constantly being denied or disconnected by online resources and games, web-pages had about a 65% chance to not load(including the windows update page) most would load after a ctrl+f5 but my mailserver never did, i uninstalled and everything is back to normal. ill wait untill SP2 ver 2 is released. anyone who uses heavy net apps should wait on this. my email site actually told me not to install SP2 bacause of some small problems and i was unwise to ignore their request.

One thing I recommend is a clean install with sp2. Why? because when you have XP tweaked and services turned off and so on, it completly wigged out. I was getting lock ups and blue screen errors. I guess if you have things altered dont add sp2. I did a format and clean install then updated and walla sp2 works great....damn thing even has pop up stopper. Well I put in Norton antivirus and internet security cuz I dont seem to trust XP's firewall.

After upgrading to XPSP2, my system performance has degraded significantly. Adobe Premiere used to take ~1.5 hours to render a video BEFORE the upgrade but it now takes over 2.5 hours. The free disk space is about the same. Same result after defrag'ing the disk.

Also, media player 10 has rendered my DVD drives invisible. Boot hangs unless and until I open the drives. And the DVD writer program doesn't recognize the drives. When I restored the old version of the media player, the drives work fine. The system is still slow. I am praying to my favorite god and undoing the upgrade. Will let you know how it goes.

Gopinath

Installed XP SP2 on my laptop. Everything works fine except the programs that I had configured to start with windows did not. the power icon and volume icon don't show up either. Thats the only quirk I found with the patch.

SP2 was a barrel of fun. At first it seemed alright. Then select websites stoped loading. Various other web functionality slowly slipped away. On reboots sometimes the taskbar icons would not appear. Then applications started having random errors, certain windows dialogues would fail to load citing various errors(such as task manger, or desktop properties). Not to mentinon annoying questions and pesky info bubbles. The last straw was several failed disk write warnings, several currupted (although insignificant) files, and a completely useless internet connection. I unninstalled it after only a day and a half of use and my computer is back to normal.
I'd give SP2 a D, for dumb as hell.
(maybe they should have tested this one a little more)

Somebody said in a previous posting, dont install it for at least six months, if at all, just think of all those people who have auto update on and now have naff machines, I am a computer installer, thank you microsoft for creating lots of work for me. why dont you get MAC to white you a windows system, seeing as you stole it from them in the first place and F----D it up. even the Amiga OS was better then your poor attempts.

I watched and waited a month before installing SP2 and the results were a bit worse then expected.

Pre-Installation:
=================
First off, I learned about problems with P2P connection attempts being limited, so I was ready to deal with that. I also learned about issues with DivX Codecs, but I found a solution in advance.

Basic System Specs:
===================
P4-2GHz
512M RAM
WinXP SP1 w all latest updates
McAfee Virus (updated)

Problems with Install:
======================
When rebooted, the following files were missing, forcing me to "Expand" the original files from the XP CD-ROM I386 folder:

c_1252.nls
c_437.nls
l_intl.nls

Microsoft Office XP needed to be re-installed from the original CD (because crazy dialogs appeared when opening any shortcut, prohibiting use)

Microsoft Project 2000 needed to be re-installed from the original CD (wouldn't load).

Corel Photo Paint 8.0 had to be re-installed, as the SP2 update nuked a necessary DLL (no biggie, but annoying).

A couple of Apps requiring Visual Basic DLLs failed, as the DLLs no longer existed. Required an internet download.

........

So everything "seems" fine after all of this fixing. I wasn't prepared for the pop-up blocker to be auto-activated, but there it is... I guess I'll keep it going.

Obviously, my experience was a bad one, and I understand that most people will be okay. Note that I'm rather experienced with PC configurations and was surprized about the number of problems that I had to manually fix.

I would have held off for another month (into October) but I knew I'd have 24 hours to spare now. I needed 10 1/2 hours to get everything back to "normal".

Best of luck!

I had SP2 running fine for at least a week. It was only after a short period of stability, that all these BSOD'S started to occur... random restarts and for some reason.... upon rebooting, my graphics card doesn't initialise and my monitor goes into standby mode.... + many other irritable things.

INSTEAD OF USING US AS GUINEA PIGS.... couldn't they have at least tested it out themselves before sending it out into the wild? Oh no wait... this IS microsoft we're talking about... -.-

I'd advise people to steer clear of SP2.... you have been warned.

WinXP+SP1 = rock solid stability.
WinXP+SP1+SP2= headaches and temporary insanity.

Just googled to this blog looking for SP2 issues. It's clear there are many issues, far beyond what MS has alerted users to.

We did a test upgrade on 2 SP1 systems. The first is a fully-load but very clean box with newest Intel/Gigabyte/ATI, etc. gear. We could not disable the firewall notification or monitoring; it kept re-enabling itself. So turned off the Service. However, system occasionally freezes and then simply craps out, requiring hard reset.

Second system is very simple newer test Asus/AMD rig with no sw loaded except DSL. Began getting lock-ups, ended up doing a repair install. Two days later, lock ups again and will not re-boot in any mode except Recovery. Re-built everything possible in that mode, no change. Must clean install now.

I'm pleased for those who have had an OK experience with SP2. But clearly the pct of those with serious problems is totally unacceptable. There are no excuses, period.

We're moving to Linux.

I have been running sp2 now for about 2 weeks on a new hp pavillion laptop and everything since to be working fine, execpt p2p sharing, almost every software that I have installed on the laptop that has to do with p2p works for a day or so and it stop responding after a short period of time. The only one that is holding on so far is e-donkey2000. I have installed and remove just about every other software and it is just not working. It appears that microsoft has done something to crack down on p2p sharing. We will have to work on it to get rid of the gig and get it to work right.

IT SUCKS!!, P2P software like Kazaa,Ares ,Imesh, ecc.. dont work on it and slows down internet connection the only thing that works right is the firewall because it it blocks all everything except windows applications.

IT SUCKS!!, P2P software like Kazaa,Ares ,Imesh, ecc.. dont work on it and slows down internet connection the only thing that works right is the firewall because it it blocks all everything except windows applications.

Wat een gezeik over dat servicepack 2 hier de hele dag. Is hier niet gewoon een leuke gozer die mij eens lekker en diep in mijn poepgaatje wil neuken?

I am glad to see there is a website for blood donors to register and for those who are a place to get great information. Keep up the good work!

I installed sp2 and now i can not open adobe. The program freezes. The adobe people want to charge me $39. to fix the problem. I guess my pride or anger will not let me. I know there has to be a better solution. joe

In answer to Joe, take it of and dont use it, all these companies who are trying to get money out of you, tell them to send the bill to microsoft, its bloody outrageous. I have heard of so many people having big problems. My advise to anyone is to make a backup of your system partition using Norton Ghost, if you dont have it, you should really get it, can save you hours of work. Once you have a backup, Install windows clean and then put SP2 on, then install your software. If you then find problems, all you have to do is to put your backup on, takes 10 to 15 minutes. your laughing. when you create a backup, best to do it to a external HD for safety and future use.

I am running XP Home edition. Since I installed SP2 I cannot move a web page to outlook express so it can be sent on e-mail.
I also cannot send cards made in Print Artist 12, or microsoft word.

Loaded SP2 on my Toshiba Tecra 8100 laptop running XP Pro expecting it to work as SP1 (smooth). Not so. It was agonizingly slow and upon rebooting no desktop icons worked. IE didn't load nor did Explorer. Rebooted several times with no success. That was very frustrating so I uninstalled SP2 and all is fine. I won't reload it, at least any time soon.

Anyone had the problem of machine hanging when you write click on an icon or drive? I have to log off then back on ....very strang.

I have been using Outlook Express errors repair tool for the past few months and LOVE it.
I've even recommended it to all my friends. Outlook Express more stable and secure than other programs.

I must admit to being more impressed with Tool for Outlook Express fix. I've even recommended it to all my friends.

i have no sp2 in my pc

SP2's issue with Goback 3 or Goback 4 on an Athlon64 PCI Express system can be resolved easily by adding the following after the default Boot in Boot.ini

/noexecute=alwaysoff /NOPAE

so that it reads something like

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINXPH="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /noexecute=alwaysoff /NOPAE

instead of

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINXPH="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

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