Well, I'd bet a thick dime that the systems that blew up were updated before AV SW, or certain utilities were uninstalled and the affected systems were rebooted "prior" to installing SP2 RC1/2. Probably a mass of explorer.exe errors on first boot, or the failure of key files to be written...
Intentional tests we ran suggested that users needed to uninstall all AV products "before" updating to SP2. McAffee's AV products resulted in the highest incidence of failure and Panda Software resulted in no failures. Panda did result in false reports that restricted users were not necessarily running recognizable AV SW - despite uninstalls and re-installs. However, all such services were running, normally.
For users on domains, Admins should be centrally controlling AV and GPO impacting the same, or at least have tested the upgrade on all systems and sub-systems by now - there has been enough time. If not, then they have failed their users, or at least failed to effectively communicate the need for testing to their leaders.
Bottom line is, this work is either a profession, a passion or both. In any case, each should either test and develop and execute patch proliferation policies/practices, or accept the consquences for not doing so. MS offers great free tools and technical guides for this and many other related purposes. Similar guides are all over the net.
|