XP SP3 everywhere

Following the yin of my recent road trip to Scandinavia I discovered the yang when I realised Microsoft had finally released Windows XP Service Pack 3. As I am one of the many who have failed to embrace Windows Vista in any meaningful way, I still have a reasonable(!) number of XP machines, both physical and virtual.

Pre-install research revealed few reported problems. I was, however, intrigued to read that MS currently seem to recommend not installing SP3 on HP desktops that have AMD processors, due to an "infinite reboot loop" problem. No doubt this is a fair few machines and apparently MS Update does not check for this before starting the SP3 update. There is a Registry fix but that all seems like a bit of a hack. My hardware estate running Windows is exclusively Intel with my few AMD based machines running Linux of some flavour, so no problems for me there.

I distributed SP3 using WSUS to most machines and used the off-line package to the remaining four, encountering no real problems. One of my machines running Agnitum's Outpost Firewall complained that "C:\WinOS\system32\services.exe" was in use but this was just a symptom of OPF's self-protection which I had forgotten to disable before running the update.

I also took the opportunity to reclaim a fair chunk of disk space on each machine by deleting the uninstall directories left behind after each hotfix. IMHO, this is something MS should really look to address as unnecessarily full system disks are never good news.

Now it's done, all the machines seem to be running happily. The only remaining task is now to slipstream SP3 into the network and CD build media.