Windows 2003 SP2 Oddities
The Second Service Pack for Windows 2003 (both x86 and x64 editions) and for XP Professional, x64 Edition was released without much fanfare a week ago. There was initially some controversy in the Release Notes which suggested that one would need to uninstall IE7 prior to running the update, and then reinstall it, but that was cleared up within a couple of days, thankfully.
Since the release, I've had a chance to install the SP2 on 7 systems, all via WSUS:
At Work:
- One XP Professional x64 system
At Home:
- Two XP Professional x64 systems
- One Server 2003 x86 system
- One Server 2003 x64 system
- One Server 2003 R2 x86 system
- One Server 2003 R2 x64 system
All of the Service Pack installs on the Server Editions of Windows were successful on the first try -- both 32-bit and 64-bit. This is, of course, as it should be.
All three of the XP x64 installs, however, needed at least two separate attempts before they were successful. I was almost tempted to install it manually. I'll have to review the logs more thoroughly in the next couple weeks and see if I can discern a pattern. My workstation at the office is an HP, and the two 64-bit XP systems at home are Dell Inspiron 1501 laptops. While there is some commonality of software on the two laptops, there is not that much between home and work that should account for this. When it initially occurred at work, I had a totally different suspect in mind (Kaspersky Internet Security v6.0) since I was in the midst of testing out some software, but with a similar occurrence at home (minus the flaky software), I'm not sure what the verdict is right now.
One more bit of weirdness: At home, any scheduled jobs on the laptops that used the SYSTEM account had their credentials broken in some way. When looking at the properties, I could see that it was essentially blank, because it filled in with whatever account I used to look at the jobs. Resetting them to use the SYSTEM account again resolved the issue.
So far, those are the only anomalies I've noticed.
About Logik!
Andrew S. Baker aka ASB aka Logik!
Andrew is an accomplished, hands-on IT Executive with a solid track record of providing timely and cost-effective business solutions using technology. With over 16 years experience in Information Technology, he has proven to be effective both as a Team Leader and as an individual contributor in designing, deploying, securing and maintaining enterprise networks.
His personal interests include Astronomy, Basketball, Bible Study, Chess, Comics, Computers,
Family Life Ministries, Reading and Strategy/Role Playing games...
Some of his contributions include several whitepapers on technology and Information Security, the UltraTech Knowledgebase, various postings to technology mailing lists and forums, active participation on LinkedIn Answers, along with a number of interviews for articles published in industry magazines.
A condensed version of
Andrew's current resume is available here.