Overcoming Windows Service Pack 2 WoesIf you read the computer trades, you'll see this complaint pop up often: "I just put Service Pack 2 on my Windows XP machine and now some of my programs don't work. What's wrong? In one sense, nothing is wrong. Service Pack 2 (SP2) is doing exactly what it was designed to do. However, you're going to have to make some changes for some programs to work successfully with the patched version of SP2. One of the reasons SP2 was released was to correct a number of security holes in Windows XP. Many of these holes resulted not from programming errors, but from the way Windows XP was configured as it was shipped. Traditionally, Microsoft has sent out its operating systems with the various settings in "permissive" mode. In other words, they were set so as much software as possible would run. Of course, the problem was that those permissive settings could be exploited by bad guys to do nasty things to your computer. One of the things SP2 does is to close a lot of holes by resetting switches. That's fine for security, but a lot of other programs, especially ones that deal with the Internet, were written under the assumption that these switches would set permissively. With the change, some of those programs won't work. Sometimes these programs didn't just fail, they took the computer down with them. One particularly irritating example is an application called T.V. Media. It is irritating because most people consider it spyware, T.V. Media exists to play ads on your computer. However, when users tried to install SP2 on computers with T.V. Media, it crashed the system back to the Blue Screen of Death. This is a lot less of a problem than it was when SP2 first came out. Microsoft and the other software companies have been working diligently to identify and fix the problems. Today, nearly everything has been patched or has a new release to work with SP2. Of course, if you don't have the patch, you can still have problems when you install SP2. The fix is a three-step process: - Use Windows XP's System Restore feature to roll back your system to before you installed SP2. This will let you get back to work (or playing) temporarily
- Check the software vendor's web site for appropriate fixes or patches. Often this will be as simple as going into the Settings menu and changing a setting on XP. Sometimes the manufacturer will have a patch for you to download. Alternatively, you can check Microsoft's site at:
http://support.microsoft.com/windowsxpsp2
This is Microsoft's information central for SP2 - Once your system is patched, reinstall SP2
There you have it. These steps should alleviate a lot of the SP2 woes.
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