Potential Service Pack 3 Problems

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As many of you may know, Microsoft has recently issued Service Pack 3 for Windows 2000. Regular readers of Woody’s newsletters know the drill, but it bears repeating – wait a few weeks before you install this Service Pack, and let the bleeding-edge gluttons for punishment (such as yours truly) shake out the bugs and quirks before you do it yourself.

THere have been sporadic reports regarding Blue Screens of Death appearing on certain installations. No pattern has emerged yet, so if you don’t fancy the color blue over icons – hold off. Paul Thurrott of WinInfo fame noted it in his e-zine last Friday.

In addition, Microsoft has already posted the following Knowledge Base article in regards to Service Pack 3:

• Q309601: Some Windows 2000 Hotfixes May Cause a Conflict with Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows 2000.[/list] This article addresses the results from installing post-SP3 hotfixes first, and applying SP3 afterwards. There are a handful of Windows 200 post-SP3 hotfixes, and you get a warning if you try to service pack over them – ignore it and you could be toast.

  Please, use caution and common sense – unless you have a specific need or enjoy beta testing, give this release at least two weeks in the wild before you apply it!

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OK…I probably asked for this…had a system meltdown (HD failure) and had to restore backups…SP3 came out that day so I figured things couldn’t get much worse…I could always restore back to where I was before…

Everything works great, BUT I can’t right click on any of my disks in Windows Explorer and get Properties or Sharing… dialog boxes. This is a huge pain in the keister. Anyone else experience this?

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Did you verify that the hard drives were still good before restoring?

Do a full surface scan checking for errors.

Run the drive vendor’s diagnostics programs.
Most, if not al ldrive vendors have free diagnostics programs you can download.

I went thru this a bit over 3 years ago.

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Hi Howard.

I did full disk scans twice before installing SP3. I wanted to run another scan to be sure of the integrity of the disk when I noticed that I couldn’t access the properties dialog boxes from Windows Explorer. Rebooting hasn’t worked, so I’ll try to find the appropriate diagnostics programs and report back.

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Here’s another gotcha in SP3: I had upgraded Internet Explorer (IE) to version 6.0, so I could take advantage of continuing support and security patches. To go with IE6, I installed Windows Media Player (WMP) 7.1 with its cumulative security patch. After the SP3 upgrade, guess what: IE was reverted to version 5.01 and the cumulative security patch to WMP was gone! I had to reinstall IE6, reinstall its cumulative scurity patch, then reinstall the WMP cumulative security patch.

Now, I had read all the posted information about SP3 at the Microsoft Web site, and nowhere did they say anything about downgrading IE, or how to prevent such an action. Does anyone know how to suppress this in the SP3 upgrade? Sande

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Hmmmn, I didn’t have that happen to me – IE stayed the same after the service pack application. WiMP I don’t know about – I don’t use it, but it’s possible that the security patch for it is post-SP3 which would explain the odd behavior you experienced.

Did you try uninstalling SP3 to see if everything reverted to normal?

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No, I didn’t try uninstalling SP3. It seems to be stable (on my IBM ThinkPad 600X), so I didn’t want to risk anything else going wrong.

In the next week, I should be able to test my theory twice more, on other brands of computers. I’ll post back results here.

And the WMP patch WM320920.exe _is_ “post-SP3”, despite its initial posting date of May 2002. Sande

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You’re right, it doesn’t always happen: I just applied SP3 to a Compaq Deskpro EP that started with IE6 and WMP 7.1. and IE version 6.0 stayed put, with its latest patches. And I think the WMP 7.1 patch was preserved too, because the WindowsUpdate site doesn’t tell me it’s missing. Sande

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Since applying SP3 or perhaps the .net framework (unsure which one), I have lost access to my Display Properties|Background controls. The tab shows up but all the controls are non-working or grayed out. I’ve tired messing aorund in the registry and installing the latest video driver all to no avail. This seems ot be the only problem I am experiencing right now, so I will leave it be until I have to rebuild or move to XP.

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Do you have on your system? A great number of people are having video problems with SP3 and PC AnyWhere .

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My post-SP3 symptom is the disappearance of the Monitor from the Device Manager. The Display Properties now shows “Default Monitor” under the Monitor tab and ACPI no longer affects the monitor.

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I just took the plunge in the wee hours this morning, with a test machine. Everything seemed fine at 1:30, but at restart at 8:30, all I have is an empty screen, with only a mouse pointer!

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Can you boot into safe mode and uninstall the service pack?

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That was the first thing I tried to do, and now I have a little egg on my face . In safe mode, I found an IP address conflict that Windows wasn’t telling me about in normal mode. Resolving that got me back to relatively normal operation. So, I’m going to leave SP3 on, and try to install more software–I already have Office 2000 SR-1a, anti-virus and e-mail, and I’m having a little trouble with the Adobe Acrobat reader. If I get a chance I’ll try to duplicate some of the other problems that have been posted.

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Today I noticed something new–an “automatic update wizard” just like the pesky thing in WinXP. Did it come with the service pack?

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yep. You can manage it on the Control Panel

Joe

--Joe

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I need to deploy this service pack to about 2000 PCs. I’ve seen some odd things happen on the PCs at my desk, but I was wondering if anyone else had seen similar problems.

Explorer doesn’t always display correctly the first time. There’s a 3-5 second delay while the system “refreshes” the display, this is for the local harddrive. For network drives, either on Win2k or Novel servers, the display refreshes every couple of seconds making for a jumpy display.

I have some work-arounds for 2 of the new features included with service pack 3 (new automatic update service and “set program access and defaults” on add/remove programs panel) but was wondering if there were other new features included that I haven’t found yet.

any help would be appreciated.

thanks, nancy

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