Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) installation

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Since none of the PCs for which I am responsible has “Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System”, a Point Of Sale application, installed, I thought I might as well update them.

So far I have installed SP3 on 19 work and home PCs and laptops, which has taken between 11 minutes (for the newest Dell Optiplex 330) and 62 minutes (for an ancient just-about Pentium IV PC with 256 MB of RAM) from start-of-install to receiving the machine back usably after the reboot. No problems were experienced, except that the Windows Scripting Host command prompt window which appears during the post-reboot startup occasionally displayed well over a dozen identical error messages in rapid succession, rather than the single word “Done” which appeared on the other PCs, before terminating, apparently normally. (In fact you get two command prompt windows, but I’ve never seen anything displayed in the second one.)

Thankfully, I encountered no instance of the snappily-titled Windows XP SP3 BSoD Endless Reboot Loop with Stop c0000139 on GDI32.dll Error.

This information is just to give some idea of how long the SP3 installation process might take on your PC when SP3 again becomes available, once Microsoft has put a check in that your PC isn’t running the above POS application!

Thanks to Alan for the original link to obtain SP3 (it was a 316.4 MB download, by the way)…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Well, YOU’VE been a busy little beaver, er, badger here lately haven’t you? Nineteen machines is certainly a load of updating and I’m glad to hear of your good furtune. So, I hope you don’t mind a dummy asking what is this POS thing you talked about and where did you see it? I didn’t get it from Alan’s thread and that’s when I downloaded but haven’t tackled the install yet.

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See Microsoft’s point of sale system doesn’t like Vista SP1 or XP SP3 on AskWoody.com.

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Ooops, that’ll teach me to be shy of Woody’s page after that recent scare! Thanks…

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I have just installed SP3 on the oldish notebook computer I use for testing. All went reasonably well, although experienced a spoolsv.exe protection fault message during startup after the reboot, which I just OK’d.

But now, on startup, the computer always goes to the Windows Advanced Options Menu. I then have to accept Start Windows Normally, then accept XP Windows at the Select Operating System Screen (rather than the alternative Recovery Console).
Curiously, it I hit F8 at the start of the boot process, Windows starts up without presenting the Advanced Options Menu – which seems to be the reverse of how it should be.

Setting timeout in boot.ini from 0 to a non-zero value only has an effect if F8 is pressed at the start of boot-up.

Anyone else experienced this? What causes this Advanced Options Menu to appear?

Chris

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What have you got in your C:BOOT.INI? Unless I’m very much mistaken it’s the ‘default’ line which controls what gets loaded. An example:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

I can’t see any reason at all why SP3 should go anywhere near BOOT.INI!

A quick Google comes up with this and on the board I found that link the chap replaced the laptop’s CMOS battery, and all was well. (Your CMOS Battery May Vary!)

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Thanks for your thoughts. And it does seem like a coincidental hardware problem. Now having problems entering the password, because one key is adding one or more ‘z’s. I’ll need to do more investigation…

Chris

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Hello, I tried installing Service Pack three twice. But both times after installation the add/remove windows components dialogue stopped working with the following error:

————————————————————————
Setup was unable to open information file setupqry.inf.
Contact you system administrator. The specific error code is 0x2 at line 0.
————————————————————————

I’m using an admin account with XP pro. I also noticed that Sp3 installed Outlook express, and messenger which I didn’t have. I’m not sure where setupqry.inf comes from. My Sp2 version doesn’t have one and XP3 doesn’t install one either. If anyone has a solution to this I ‘ll try SP3 again.

Thanks,

Chris (Hunt)

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Check out Sysoc.inf unattend install/ applying SP3 – TechNet Forums & more links from The specific error code is 0x2 at line 0 setupqry.inf – Google Search.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks for the links , Joe. That was a good idea searching on the error code name. I was searching more generally. The page you linked to describes my situation. I originally used nlite to do the installation. I had a go at retrieving the missing files, but don’t appear to have them all. I guess I’ll hold off on SP3 until Microsoft make it obligatory to install further updates, at which point I may need to do an installation for Windows from scratch.

Best wishes,

Chris

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If you have a Technet or MSDN subscription you can download XP with SP-3 integrated. Otherwise, I’d suggest you slipstream SP-3. That’ll make an install much easier and quicker.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks for the suggestion. If/when I do the install I’ll check out nlite. Hopefully by then the version for SP3 will be out of beta.

Chris

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