OT: Beware Automatic Downloads this week.

[Fairlight]

Just a heads-up for XP users.  Had automatic downloads waiting this
morning, and applied them.  When it came back up, five of my applications
that start at boot crashed and wanted to send reports home.  "Hmm," I think
to myself.

I reboot, *blam*, same thing, same five applications.  They really had
nothing in common, being written/compiled in different languages (VC++,
Delphi, etc.) and serving completely different needs in some cases.

Looks like either the IE8 upgrade failed, or Automatic Updates screwed up
.NET somehow, one of the two.  I rolled back to a restore point from
2:30am, but it left IE thinking it was 8 and not 7, and with NO menu, no
text in the title bar, etc.  It was lobotomised.  But the rollback fixed
the crashes.

You can imagine the email I send Microsoft at that point.  :)

Tonight I took the time to look at the updates available, and applied them
one at a time.  IE8 went in first, and that was ok.  I grabbed the .NET
patch next, and blissfully it came up ok.  Everything now seems to be
working fine.

Thing is, the .NET is shown only once in my history, and the IE8 is shown
twice.  I'm really not sure if Automatic Updates only did half the job
first time around, or if the IE8 update somehow fouled things.  I show no
failed patches, oddly enough.  I do know it didn't take the time to
download the .NET patch this morning, but again...did IE8's update screw
things up, or is it Automatic Updates at fault?  No telling.

My advice is to NOT use Express updates, for one.  Look at what you're
actually getting this week.  I'd also shut down most of your systray apps.
Five of mine were taking a dive, and I shut those particular ones down in
advance of re-patching.  Not sure if it helped, but better to be safe.
Usually it's not even an issue, but who knows...

And make sure you have a restore point prior to patching.  You may need it.

So, as usual, I've fixed the issue before Microsoft can be bothered to even
acknowledge there's a problem.  Three days from now, I'll probably get an
email listing a 70 step "solution", 99.9% of which isn't even pertinent.
That's their usual M.O.  Happened the last time I had issues with .NET as
well.

Target system was XP SP3 Home 32bit.

mark->
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