SP2 War Stories

I originally wanted to do a fresh install again of XP along with SP2. But since my current one isn't really broken, I just updated it and seems to be running fine.

I just installed SP2 this morning and everything appears normal so far. I did have some slight fragmentation of the HDD, but that was cleaned up in a few minutes. PC seems to boot a little faster, but not much to really notice. However, When I open up my Network Places and Control Panel, I have a new Wireless connection Wizard thingy in there, and I have no wireless card in any of my machines. Anyone else notice this?

Also, the ICF is turned 0n, but my computer can still be accessed fine throughout my network and vice-versa. It appears to have automatically set itself to the parameters of my LAN.

EDIT:

I've also noticed, on a reboot, the "Professional" in the Windows xp boot logo is missing. It just says "Windows xp".

I have that in my Control Panel as well, and I don't have any wireless products.

said by JollyStomper:

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However, When I open up my Network Places and Control Panel, I have a new Wireless connection Wizard thingy in there, and I have no wireless card in any of my machines. Anyone else notice this?

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It's an added feature. And yep it shows up on all installs.

said by JollyStomper:

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I've also noticed, on a reboot, the "Professional" in the Windows xp boot logo is missing. It just says "Windows xp".

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They removed them, they also removed the copyright date.

they also made the boot screen the same for the professional and home editions... my home edition now has BLUE beads in the little bar.

Microsoft does not want us to know how old the OS is. Since it will be at least 5 years old when longhorn is out.:D

said by GlenQuagmire:

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Microsoft does not want us to know how old the OS is. Since it will be at least 5 years old when longhorn is out.:D

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LOL, good one!

I have no idea why they would take that off, but considering the way things have been going for them I'd guess that there must be some legal reason for it...

Microsoft does not want us to know how old the OS is. Since it will be at least 5 years old when longhorn is out.

It would be worst if they named it Windows 2001. Although it emphasizes an "upgrade", after release it emphasizes how obsolete it is.

We can't just get frequent stable transparent releases. MS wants you to acknoledge that you are upgrading the software so it just makes sense when it's time to upgrade to Longhorn, which you will have to pay for.

Windows Update v5 while d/l a sound card driver:

New d/l interface.

said by JollyStomper:

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I just installed SP2 this morning and everything appears normal so far. I did have some slight fragmentation of the HDD, but that was cleaned up in a few minutes. PC seems to boot a little faster, but not much to really notice. However, When I open up my Network Places and Control Panel, I have a new Wireless connection Wizard thingy in there, and I have no wireless card in any of my machines. Anyone else notice this?

Also, the ICF is turned 0n, but my computer can still be accessed fine throughout my network and vice-versa. It appears to have automatically set itself to the parameters of my LAN.

EDIT:

I've also noticed, on a reboot, the "Professional" in the Windows xp boot logo is missing. It just says "Windows xp".

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You installed SP2 for XP Home, not XP Professional. Just a theory, but, I would speculate, it is probably the reason you are not seeing the XP Professional logo when the OS boots.

said by szamel:

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You installed SP2 for XP Home, not XP Professional. Just a theory, but, I would speculate, it is probably the reason you are not seeing the XP Professional logo when the OS boots.

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Nope, they did take it out for Pro.

Downloaded it yesterday, made a slipstream CD and will rebuild over the weekend. Thanks to all who provided info on creating the image.

I have a major war story! I installed SP2 yesterday on four of my computers! Everything seemed to work fine a little defrag well 266 megs or whatever and backing up will normally cuase that no matter what you install I would asume. So no big deal then I get up this morning and fire up the computers and they ALL! worked just fine! Gezzz I thought? hmmmm what are all the MS haters going to do unless I have a war story?

So seeing as nothing bad happend becuase of sp2 being put on 4 totally differant style computers I will have to try and bust one so the fear mongers and toe dippers in there lambs wool will be happy later.

So no war story after all ( Yet! )...

No war stories for 2 desktops and a laptop here. Everything went smooth as silk. Most applications have been tested including various security software, games, and Nero 6 Ultra. But I wouldn't have been so bold without Acronis Trueimage.

i have been using xp sp2 since the first rc1 came out. I never had a problem that were not easily fixed. Mostly firewall blocking ports that were needed for windows file sharing and other programs.

Another problem that a couple of us have noticed is problems importing the XP SP2 .adm files into the Group Policy snap-in on both 2000 and 2003 servers.

I imported these when XP first hit our network without issue. And again when SP1 came out.

But now after importing them after a SP2 install, the snap-in gives dozens of truncating error messages every time you open Group Policy.

Hello,

In response to the notifications of the truncating errors... they do not show up if you use the Group Policy Management Console ( »www.microsoft.com/window ··· ult.mspx ), which you can download from Microsoft. Not only does it not give these errors, but its a dozen times more powerful than Active Directory Users & Computers management console!

I'm in the process of reformatting to reinstall with sp2. I tried RC1 and it broke a couple of things when I did an update, but ran fine when I did a clean install.

Haven't used any of the subsequent releases. I guess I'll find out for myself here in a few hours.

after installing sp2 I am unable to get the speed test to work, the speed test runs, but it does not foward to a new page so I can not get my results. aparently this had to do with microsoft disabling java fowarding, but i have been unable to find a solution.

said by dsjk1006:

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after installing sp2 I am unable to get the speed test to work, the speed test runs, but it does not foward to a new page so I can not get my results. aparently this had to do with microsoft disabling java fowarding, but i have been unable to find a solution.

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Are you using pop up blocking in a symantec/norton product? If so disable it and try again.

Just go to the internet explorer page, tools, internet options, advanced, restore defaults. I fixed it this way before.

The Pop-up Blocker in Internet Explorer in the new Windows XP Service Pack 2 is turned on. If you have another Pop-up blocker running, like I did in ZoneAlarm Pro, it will cause the speed-test to not forward to the dslreports.com results page. I simply turned off the Pop-up blocker in ZoneAlarm Pro and everything worked correctly.

You can also add www.dslreports.com to the list of sites not to block in Internet Explorer's Pop-up blocker.

said by KeithBB:

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I simply turned off the Pop-up blocker in ZoneAlarm Pro and everything worked correctly.

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Everyone should disable their external popup blockers, and just let IE handle it. It's by far the best one out there.

yeah IE has the best popup blocker if you're not using Firefox. seriously try it if you haven't. secure, fast, why not?

I have tried it. It's no more secure than IE SP2, slower than IE on my system, and I don't like it.

Thanks Guys. I'd have never guessed this one. I installed a new cable modem and tried three separate PC's today. One running only XP SP2 firewall. Speed test worked fine and produced results. One with SP2 firewall disabled and the free ZA. Worked fine also. Final PC with XP SP2 firewall disabled and ZA Pro. I could not get results back unless I turned off ZA Pro. I followed your recommendation turned off the ad blocker, added www.dslreports.com to the IE pop up blocker, and still no success. Turned off cookie control (was set to Med) in ZA Pro and now speed test returns results.

I left the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Pop-up blocker turned "ON".

In my Norton Personal Firewall "Ad Blocking", I used "Advanced" to add "www.dslreports.com" to "Web Contents Options".

On "Global Settings" tab, all items are set to "Default".

On "User Settings" tab, all items are set to "Permit".

On "Ad Blocking" there are no entries.

This solved my problem of the speed test not completing.

Installed it last night and after about 4-5 hours of use I have not run into any problems. I think it's the first windows SP I have installed that has not given me at least one problem.

I've installed it on at least 15 computers at work and on three at home. I didn't run into any problems on all but one computer.

Just uninstalled SP2 beta, reinstalled the sp2 nice and simple. No problems encountered at all. In the process I was warned of the programs I installed since the beta might not work, but they worked fine after the install.

said by Rickez:

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Just uninstalled SP2 beta, reinstalled the sp2 nice and simple. No problems encountered at all. In the process I was warned of the programs I installed since the beta might not work, but they worked fine after the install.

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There was no need to uninstall the beta of SP2 as the final released installed over the beta with no problems.

SP2 as of last night, after a format and reload I couldn't find it on the Microsoft download site. I have been running the SP2 Beta and I already miss it.

Been running SP2 RC2 Build 2149 for over a month now. Downloaded and installed the final the other night and been running smooth as silk since. Now just to lock my system down so my brother can't install a bunch of crap on it while he is here.

Overall no major problems with SP2.

I did, however, have to reinstall my antivirus software (Norton). For some reason it just seemed to not load correctly after installing SP2. Task manager showed it as being installed, but there was no visible icon that I could find. And, pressing on the AV program launch icon wouldn't start the program (or generate any messages or errors).

So I did a reinstall of NAV and everything went fine after that.

The only thing so far that doesn't seem to work properly is the new anti-virus monitor. It says my Kapersky AV is installed but it can't tell if it's running or not. No big deal, and since there is a checkbox to monitor it yourself, I don't get nagged about it either.

There's also already a modified uxtheme.dll so all my custom themes work too.

That was exactly the same problem that I had as well in the beginning.

I did the reinstall because I felt uncomfortable not being able to see my AV status though from the AV screen. I'm pretty sure the AV program was active.

NAV does the same thing. They have a patch I downloaded for it and now it workds.

I have 5 pc's on my network and installed sp2 on my crap/test pc and it seems to be fine. I am going to wait and install on the rest of them after I hear that alot of people have had no major issues after installing sp2. I installed sp1 right away when it came out, and it slowed my pc down and seemed to be buggy.

I downloaded and installed SP2 to my notebook and desktop computers. I downloaded from:

»www.microsoft.com/downlo ··· ylang=en

All is fine and all is working OK so far including no problems at all with ATI video and NAV. I did though have a bit of a problem getting the Windows Updater running. If anyone is also having this problem and getting "Error number: 0x80072EFD" I can offer some suggestions that may fix it.

I have one major problem. It seems if I leave my PC turned on overnight and come back the next morning it would freeze. Only 1 out of 20 so that's not too bad I suppose.

I was also bored last night so I started cruizing porn and warez sites to test the new pop-up blocker. I came to one site that came up with "Our system detected the use of Internet Explorer new pop-up blocker, Pop-up blocker not allowed on this site"
Their site then proceeded to bombard me with pop ups. In about 3 seconds I had over 100 instances of IE running and the pop-up blocker couldn't block a single one. Had to reboot the PC after that.

When I came home for lunch yesterday, I decided to download SP2. It wasn't done downloading when I went back to work, so I just let it continue. Upon returning home at the end of the day, the download was complete and was waiting for the install command from me. I wanted to wait until Symantec posted their update to NAV Pro 2004 before I installed SP2. Well by 6:30 pm, Symantec still hadn't updated it, so I said screw it, I'm installing SP2. Before I could begin, the power went out for about an hour. Yikes! An hour later, the power came back on and I waited about 45 minutes after that for the power to settle down and then installed SP2. I had not checked to see if by then Norton had their update on Live Update. I install SP2 and reboot. I try to connect to the internet and I was getting error messages to the effect that my connection had limited capabilities and was never able to log on. Yikes! I try fixing the issue on my own, and on a whim decided maybe my ISP can help me with this. Two hours later, with help from a wonderful tech support guy at my ISP, I was up and online. At this point, I really don't know if the issue with my network card was caused by the power outage or the installation of SP2. My gut tells me it was the power outage, as I'd been running SP2 RC-2 prior to the final upgrade to SP2 with no problems. I suppose it's time for a trip to CompUSA for a new, higher-rated surge protector. But other than that glitch, SP2 has been fine.

I also had a odd NIC issue with SP2. I am currently dual booting SP1 and SP2 on separate Hard drives, and I had to swap the NIC out with an identical one, for SP2 to apply the drivers. The odd thing, is the original card still worked under SP1 fine. I reloaded the drivers under both OS versions and had had both working again. I sure am glad I keep a spare NIC laying around.

I can't get SP2
The automatic updates are not working for me

What is the version number of the official production release? I turned on auto update just to see what would happen and it started working but it does not provide any feedback or progress so I have no way of knowing if my SP2 RC2 got updated. That's why I normally don't use auto update. I see a version number of 2149 in Control Panel>System>General. Is that the production release or RC2?

2149 is one of the RC2 releases.

The RTM release is 2180.

Yesterday I installed SP2 IT version on both of my home PC's and it worked well. All I can say is I'm happy now.

If there are any MAJOR concerns, I will post.

JE

I D/L the SP2 at 3AM on Comcast in about 20 mins. Installed it on barebones computer no problem. I liked it so installed it on my wireless old HP PC. Linksys Router. It says Microsoft Broadband Networking isn't compatible with this version of windows. I noticed a different icon in sys tray so uninstall Broadband networking and still had internet connection thru the SP2, new stuff! Updated Nero and it works. Have not had one instance of a glitch or freeze. Both PC's work file sharing printer sharing Linksys Router is fine, I was worried about that. Both PC's seem snappier and IE and opera both are faster. Both of my PC's are different as night and day and they both work just fine.

Would like to add to my original post, I upgraded from ME to XP long time ago then got SP1 been about 2 years then put SP2 on top of that. The other computer was originally 98SE upgraded to XP SP1 and SP2. Both PC's have run 36 hours now.
Did not consider slipstreaming or reformatting unless I had to. All my stuff is bullet proof so far!

Let's see how long it takes for someone to complain that WU doesn't work, since part of SP2 will prevent updates for illegitimate installs. I guess you get what you pay for:p