Michael Horowitz: The day Windows XP SP3 was released I advised waiting a long time before installing it. In the three months since, I haven't installed it on a computer that mattered to me. Today, I installed it on a computer that didn't matter much, and it caused a problem. So, I tried to take advantage of the free tech support Microsoft offers for SP3 - and got a lesson in fine print.
The computer shipped with Windows XP SP2 and some vendor utilities installed. It was a good guinea pig for SP3 because there were no user-installed applications and no user-created data files on the machine.
I downloaded and installed SP3 without incident. Then I rebooted and ran Windows Update again to get the latest patches. There were a handful of recent patches, and I installed all of them except for Internet Explorer 7. This too went fine and I rebooted again, little knowing the grief that awaited.
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