XP SP2 I just went and had to try it, sigh...

[Waccoon]

After all the problems I had with Windows 2000 SP3, I've become very wary of all these sweeping patches.  I download most critical updates, but tend to wait a few months before messing with service packs.

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of known bugs will be in Longhorn...

For people that are having issues, it's well known that 95% of SP2 problems are caused by the new Windows Firewall, which needs to be configured for a lot of older programs to work. Software developers have had about 6 months notice from Microsoft about the effects of SP2, and the majority have done nothing, or are only just sending out updates when it's too late (*cough* Symantec *cough*). If you install SP2, update all of your drivers and download the latest versions of all your software.

I have mixed feelings about stuff like this.  On one hand, programmers tend to do all kinds of stupid things, many of which are easy to fix if they can spare more than a few hours out of their busy schedules.  I can't tell you how many bugs can easily be fixed in a few minutes (*cough* Firefox *cough), but they would rather add some brand new feature that takes hundreds of hours of development to make.

On the other hand, it's bad practice to change your programming interfaces so damn often.  I was really annoyed when Microsoft introduced the new PnP manager in Win98 (as a critical update, not in Win98se).  Almost half the devices we sold to our customers refused to work with this "new" version of Win98.  We had a lot of returns, that's for sure!

[Waccoon]

I then updated the latest ATI drivers and was surprised to see the screwed up display again! So I installed SP2 again, and then rolled back the ATI drivers (again!), and now I get a proper display in my app.

I have reason to believe that the ATI Catalyst 4.9 drivers are made of meatloaf.  I'm having all sorts of 2D draw problems and many of my MediaPlayer movies are skipping like crazy.  I'm running Win2K and SP4.  Anyone else have trouble like this, XP SP2 or not?

[Waccoon]

is anyone else here experiencing internet exploerer crashing everytime it closes

That's usually caused by a problem with a registry key.  Take a look under this Regedit tree:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar

...and look for anything weird.  There shouldn't be more than three branches below it, and three or four keys in each branch.  Try also deleting any keys in that branch named "ITBarLayout".  IE will rebuild the toolbar layout the next time you run it.

[Waccoon]

I'm wating for "Service Pack 2 - sp1

I miss plain old version numbers.

The biggest offenders seem to be the "name brand" computers (Crapaq, HP, Sony, etc.) and this revolves around driver updates (usually).

Having frequently repaired Compaq and HP machines, I can second this.  *NO* prebuilt system even comes close to the stability and performance of a good custom-built system.  Given all the "hacky" software they put on their machines that do really stupid low-level things (like HP's control panel utilites), it doesn't surprise me that SP2 causes trouble with those machines.

You're better off only installing updates you get from the manufacturer of your computer, so you know their idiotic driver-level tools won't barf all over SP2.

This is also why I hate it when people complain that Windows  is a sluggish lump of crap.  Realisticly, drivers and background apps cause most of the grief.

Time to backup C: and format i guess...

A Windows tradition.  Though, the last time I re-installed Win2K was a month ago when my trusty Western Digital blew up.

With this new Hitachi Deskstar, my system is not only completely silent, but Win2K system boots up in 18 seconds with MySQL and Apache turned off.  Woo!  :-D

[Waccoon]

Tried it. Every system restore failed. I got one to work, from where i 1st installed the OS. But it was soo unstable.

System restore for XP is a really bad leftover from Windows ME, and I've never seen it work properly.  Backups are your only hope.

Some people I know however, have "cracked" copies of xp.

Still beats having to re-register XP every time you change something.  By the time you really need a new service pack, you're probably due for a re-install, anyway.

Also have an OEM install of Win XP on my DELL Workstation dual Xeon machine and after I installed SP2 I lost contact with my router after 3-5 minutes after a reboot.

Actually, that's a typical problem with NT-class machines.  NT4 at work did the same thing to me, and moving to Win2K didn't help, either.  I think it has to do with the way Windows caches workgroups, and doesn't tolerate machines turning on and off randomly.  If there's a way to force Windows to refresh the workgroup listing from within Explorer, I haven't found it yet (of course, I don't work there anymore, so I don't care, either).