Microsoft Stealth Update and Windows XP repair don’t mix
Click title to read rest of article at ZDNet.com…
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
September 27th, 2007
Remember that Stealth Update I talked about a couple of weeks ago? The one that Microsoft sent down the pipes to XP and Vista users and installed it irrespective of whether the user had given consent for updates to be installed? Remember too how the apologists claimed that there was nothing wrong with how Microsoft had behaved because there was no harm done? Well, it turns out that this update isn’t as benign as we first thought and can indeed cause problems for Windows XP users if they try to repair their installation.
Information uncovered by Scott Dunn of WindowSecrets.com indicated that a bug in this update prevented users from being able to download and install patches on XP systems that have been repaired:
However, after running the repair option from an XP CD-ROM, Automatic Updates defaults to “on,” and the new 7.0.600.381 executables are automatically downloaded and installed. These new executables fail to register themselves with the operating system, preventing Windows Update from working as intended. This, in turn, prevents Microsoft’s 80 latest updates from being
