RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 13:35 -0400, joe wrote: And as for backwards compatibility, OSS software generally doesn't have to worry about backwards compatibility, the source is advailble, so most of the time it's possible to make it work. Oh, and I find wine on linux offers better than M$, for my needs. You talk throughout your email about many people at home and then also insert this gem into it... So it is ok if you break older functionality if you supply the source? What on earth for? So someone can change it to make it work again for themselves? Does this apply to even a majority of the OSS users let alone masses of home users? Reread what I said. Did I say at any point that *I* would modify it for my own purposes? Did I say at any point that Joe Average Home User could or would modify it at any point? No? What I said was that it is possible for code to be modified to over come backwards compatibility problems. Generally that isn't a problem for OS software in the first place. But when there is an abandoned OSS project, that is no longer compatible, for what ever reason, someone can take the project, (or even fork it if it is jus the original dev not liking the latest version) and make it work. This cannot be done with closed source software. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
SANS weekly newsbytes relating to this topic;; --Microsoft Releases List of Products that Could Conflict with XP sp2 (16 August 2004) Microsoft has issued a document that lists about 50 applications and games that may have trouble with the recently released Windows XP Service Pack 2. Among the problems: the new firewall may limit the ability of some applications to receive information from outside networks. Other companies have been posting information about functionality problems encountered as a result of installing SP2. http://zdnet.com.com/2102-1104_2-5311280.html?tag=printthis [Editor's Note (Pescatore): Most SP2 compatibility problems are from the Windows Firewall improvements and the changes in how RPCs are handled in Windows. Since the Windows Firewall still doesn't enforce many policy controls that enterprises require, and since the RPC fixes were badly needed, most applications that don't work with SP2 were badly broken from a security perspective anyway.] And concerning the related thread whence folks wanted to know if the windows firewall worked on outgoing patckets, and wrongly assumed it did; --Windows Firewall Lacks Outbound Traffic Blocking (13/11 August 2004) Though Windows Firewall, which arrived as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2, is a welcome addition to PC security, it doesn't provide certain functions expected from commercial firewalls. Windows Firewall does not block outbound traffic, a function which prevents computers from being used as spam or denial-of-service zombies. In addition, other applications could potentially turn Windows Firewall off. http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,117380,00.asp [Editor's Note (Tan): Security savvy users will either know how to get a better firewall or safeguard their system from being trojanized. The great improvement of this Windows Firewall is that it provides protection before network starts up. Editor's Note (Schultz): No security solution is perfect, nor can a single control measure such as a host-based firewall do everything. Critics often overlook the fact that Microsoft by all appearances is making a very concerted effort to improve security in its products. Perhaps WXP SP3 will be able to block outbound connections.] Thanks, Ron DuFresne ~~ Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation. -- Johnny Hart ***testing, only testing, and damn good at it too!*** OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
Various people are complaining about the length of this discussion and the fact that it does not belong here, I can't disagree. There are of course already plenty of places to discuss this, I will also be populating discussions on my new forum: http://ra66i.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1sid=a6ac554baec22d654a7f2f9e1eb5fbcd If anyone is interested in continuing this discussion. I will also offer aid to anyone experiencing issues with SP2 in order to learn more myself about any extra issues we come accross in the most recent upgrade. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
And as for backwards compatibility, OSS software generally doesn't have to worry about backwards compatibility, the source is advailble, so most of the time it's possible to make it work. Oh, and I find wine on linux offers better than M$, for my needs. You talk throughout your email about many people at home and then also insert this gem into it... So it is ok if you break older functionality if you supply the source? What on earth for? So someone can change it to make it work again for themselves? Does this apply to even a majority of the OSS users let alone masses of home users? Most people wouldn't know a compiler if it bit them on the little toe. Even if they had, the vast majority can't figure out how to protect themselves from things they should have been able to protect against for a while now with firewalls and such yet you figure they can go into some OS c code and tweak it to fit themselves better? I thought we had gotten past the idea that having source so you can modify it to make it work for your particular instance was such a huge benefit. This is a tremendous nightmare for source control and patching and ultimately security. Having source to look at to see what it is doing is a good thing, having source so you can modify it to suit your needs is less so. joe -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of ktabic Sent: Tuesday, August 17, 2004 12:22 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help? On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 10:33 -0300, James Tucker wrote: On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 12:52:53 +, ktabic [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Thu, 2004-08-12 at 15:54 -0500, Ron DuFresne wrote: Ahh, but this was an error on your end sir, M$ has always advised that patching or adding apps to the system should be done with everything closed, and in most cases users are best served to reboot and patch/add apps prior to doing anything but logging into the system. sure, most of the time many of the warnings about closing other applications and such can be ignored, but, with major patches like this, one should verge on the order of most caution. Hmm, ok. So you should never have anything open? Automatic updates has the option to have it download and install the updates in the background, while you work. Still, I suppose never using the system would improve the stability. Also, once this hits Window Updates (this targetted at the people saying: read the relase notes), how many are going to? The answer is not: 'Well they should do!!!' For that matter, how many are even going to realise that it's a service pack? ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
And sometimes the patch tries to be a smartass. In my case SP2 intalled its temp-files not to my TEMP-folder, but to another drive this un-standard behaviour has be microsoft standard with all the service packs of ms since win2k sp1 . -aditya Delivered using the Free Personal Edition of Mailtraq (www.mailtraq.com) ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Aug 12, 2004, at 10:19 PM, Phillip R. Paradis wrote: -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of xtrecate Ultimately what difference to an end user does it make if the applications are broken by a service pack install or a virus? None at all. But the user has control over installing service packs. And the user should have read the warnings BEFORE installing it, not after they discover something is broken. I think the update provides some long needed changes to the fundamental operation of Windows, however if Microsoft knew of the potential problems via RC2 testing, I'd have thought they'd do a little more to rectify those problems than simply releasing and disclaiming. Most of those problems are a result of a very simple problem. For certain security issues, it is possible to remain compatible with old, generally poorly written code, or to fix the security problem, but not both. There are some security issues that simply could not be fixed without creating compatibility issues. The data execution issue is one clear example; making blocks of memory allocated for data non-executable is a very effective way of preventing buffer overrun exploits from executing arbitrary code. The downside is that software (such as DivX) that intentionally tries to execute data won't work anymore. Given the choice between a secure system and a few badly written programs, I'd rather take the secure system and let the developers of those few programs that don't work due to lazy coding fix their products. Microsoft has in the past always taken the route of less security and more compatibility, and I, for one, think it's a good thing that their attitude has changed somewhat. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 03:33:18 PDT, Harlan Carvey said: Wow! MS goes about doing what the security folks have been harping on for years...providing a modicum of security in their operating system...and now it's a crap update? Protection against buffer overflows, the firewall on by default, etc...what we've been asking for and harping on...and you come back with crap updates?!? Totally ignoring for the moment whether SP2 is actual crap or not, consider the following: It *IS* totally possible for it to include a lot of features it's been needing for years, and *still* be a crap update due to other bugs. As a straw-man for instance - I think you'd agree that even an SP that made it *totally* secure would still qualify as a crap update if it got a BSOD every time a USB device was plugged or unplugged (Of course, if the crap is my app broke because my vendor was lame and relied on buggy or insecure techniques closed down by SP2, the proper thing to do is to flame the lame vendor) As an aside, MS had their collective heads in a warm dark orifice when they listened to Gibson and took out the raw packet functionality - I mean, it isn't like there aren't *other* ways that malware can send out a raw packet. If anything, they should have put it *in* so malware could use a standard supported API rather than some bletcherous backdoor method that destabilized the system. ;) pgpOA0YaprV0h.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
In some mail from xtrecate, sie said: I made the mistake of installing SP2 last night, and I'm having some serious issues. Nearly every dialog box shows up blank, I am unable to set options and/or access program functionality in practically every application on this machine. Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? If I recall correctly, NT4sp3 was not long after NT4sp2. I wonder if we can expect an XPsp3 soon that deals with all the crap that XPsp2 brings upon us. Apparently it saved everything I need for a rollback, so I'm really looking forward to doing that. The catch: The 'Add or Remove Programs' feature no longer works. The window appears, but is blank. Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Have a read of this: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=23905071 Darren ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
SP2 works fine, so long as people actually read the deployment docs *prior* to installing it. There's always going to be someone who can't install a patch or hotfix (or the OS, for that matter) -ASB On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:29:20 +1000 (Australia/NSW), Darren Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In some mail from xtrecate, sie said: I made the mistake of installing SP2 last night, and I'm having some serious issues. Nearly every dialog box shows up blank, I am unable to set options and/or access program functionality in practically every application on this machine. Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? If I recall correctly, NT4sp3 was not long after NT4sp2. I wonder if we can expect an XPsp3 soon that deals with all the crap that XPsp2 brings upon us. Apparently it saved everything I need for a rollback, so I'm really looking forward to doing that. The catch: The 'Add or Remove Programs' feature no longer works. The window appears, but is blank. Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Have a read of this: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=23905071 Darren ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
Darren, Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? Wow! MS goes about doing what the security folks have been harping on for years...providing a modicum of security in their operating system...and now it's a crap update? Protection against buffer overflows, the firewall on by default, etc...what we've been asking for and harping on...and you come back with crap updates?!? Someone goes out and blindly installs SP2 on their system, and has issues...and it's the vendor's fault? IBM issued a statement that they didn't want anyone installing the SP within their org b/c of issues they'd found during testing. For home users...if you're running your XP box on the Internet such that you *must* have SP2 in order to keep operating, and can't wait for the shake-down cruise...well, then something's already wrong with what you're doing. I guess there's just no pleasing some people. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 03:33:18AM -0700, Harlan Carvey wrote: Wow! MS goes about doing what the security folks have been harping on for years...providing a modicum of security in their operating system...and now it's a crap update? Protection against buffer overflows, the firewall on by default, etc...what we've been asking for and harping on...and you come back with crap updates?!? i agree that this is crap update. don't use windoze for anything serious, but a person familiar with windoze said sp2 breaks so much warez it is unusable. -- Where do you want Bill Gates to go today? ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
well can't speak for sp2 upgrade installations. anyways i slipstreamed sp2 into a corporate edition SP1 WinXP CD, and did a clean install. no problems at all, every single app working like before with sp1. though i gotta admit the first thing i disabled was the security center in services.though it sure might be of good use for most ppl with limited skills who directly connected to the internet with no other protection application wise no problems what so ever over here with a clean WinXP SP2 integrated install regards Thorsten ASB wrote: SP2 works fine, so long as people actually read the deployment docs *prior* to installing it. There's always going to be someone who can't install a patch or hotfix (or the OS, for that matter) -ASB On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:29:20 +1000 (Australia/NSW), Darren Reed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In some mail from xtrecate, sie said: I made the mistake of installing SP2 last night, and I'm having some serious issues. Nearly every dialog box shows up blank, I am unable to set options and/or access program functionality in practically every application on this machine. Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? If I recall correctly, NT4sp3 was not long after NT4sp2. I wonder if we can expect an XPsp3 soon that deals with all the crap that XPsp2 brings upon us. Apparently it saved everything I need for a rollback, so I'm really looking forward to doing that. The catch: The 'Add or Remove Programs' feature no longer works. The window appears, but is blank. Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Have a read of this: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=23905071 Darren ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 06:24:33AM -0400, ASB wrote: SP2 works fine, so long as people actually read the deployment docs *prior* to installing it. There's always going to be someone who can't install a patch or hotfix (or the OS, for that matter) And sometimes the patch tries to be a smartass. In my case SP2 intalled its temp-files not to my TEMP-folder, but to another drive (I guess it just took the drive with the most available diskspace). That, in my case was an iSCSI drive in a remote location I had mounted for testing. That made the installation rather slow in the beginning and crashed it completely later. Thank you for bringing us the TEMP variable, Microsoft. Nils -- In den frühen Morgenstunden explodierten in der Innenstadt zwei Atombomben. Menschen wurden dabei nicht verletzt. Fuer die Bevoelkerung bestand zu keiner Zeit eine Gefahr. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
The worst problem I have encountered with XP SP2 to date on 3 virtual machines and two physical machines is the physical machine with dual monitors needed two reboots after the install to get the display up on the extension monitor. I got a Windows Popup saying a piece of software needed an update (Nero) for this version of Windows with an actual link to the company's website, that was pretty nice and dare say not many OS vendors do things like that. I can't say that I am not annoyed by some of the changes such as all the new security dialogs that pop up and such, but being annoyed isn't a valid reason to gripe when we have been telling MS to fix their stuff and they actually make the attempt. Telling me something is trying to download a file in IE or that an installation file I am trying to run isn't from a known publisher is enhanced security, no matter how annoying it may possibly be. :o) What are the specific issues you personally have encountered? We don't need people running around quoting other stories and other complaints about how bad it was for some other person they read about or heard about through the grapevine. Basically if you don't have an issue that you specifically encountered YOURSELF on YOUR MACHINE that you are looking to tell people about to get help or document the workaround/fix, shut up, here and everywhere else. Stop wasting bandwidth. The only person who wants to hear your opinion on the Service Pack is you. Stories of people's issues with RC2 which is the link you posted really shouldn't hold back people from installing RTM. Install it, sort out the issues, work to correct them. Re: your SP statement... In the mid/late 90's Microsoft was going to attempt an SP every quarter as NT4 was still pretty fresh. I think SP2 was Jan 97 or so, and SP3 was May 97 or so. That would have fit the schedule they were trying for. I believe they backed off of that because it was too much for them internally AND corporate customers such as the bank I worked for at the time requested them to slow down since corporate IT groups had troubles getting a full SP tested and out the door every quarter. The same reason corporate IT groups requested MS release hot fixes once a month instead of whenever unless the fix was ready and there was an immediate threat. As several others on this list have pointed out multiple times, this Service Pack will break some things. First off, all Service Packs tend to break things because they are changing functionality and fixing mistakes and some companies depend on those mistakes or the functionality being a very specific way with no exception process when it isn't that exact way. Additionally, Microsoft has been admitting that this SP would be extra harsh for some time which is why they had such an open beta and RC testing phase. They wanted to try and catch as much as possible prior to the release. People inside of MS didn't have a choice but to run the betas and RCs. If the employees didn't load it, it got forced down onto their machines anyway. MS was very diligent about chewing each piece of it. Still, things will break. How can you not expect them to break? People have been whining here for some time that MS is doing this and this and that wrong and paying too much attention to legacy apps and worrying about breaking them. Now MS has said, ok, we will work towards security and not be as worried about apps that people currently run. They haven't been as aggressive in that area as they could be and that was a complaint I had. However seeing the whining produced based on how aggressive they were, makes me realize why they chose not to be as aggressive as they could have been. Just because something ran before and doesn't run now doesn't mean it is Microsoft's fault. It could be that the vendor or local programmer who wrote the program that doesn't work for you now simply didn't do it correctly. There are a lot of crap apps out there written by people with no security understanding and very little programming understanding. Hopefully this will encourage some of them to get better. Plain and simple, you can't complain that MS is doing a poor job at trying to get better and then in the next breath complain about changes they make to try and do a better job. If MS doesn't change things, things have no chance at getting better. So you can whine that MS isn't doing anything to make the OS better or you can whine that they are changing things and breaking stuff. You can't do both. There will be issues, no one writes perfect code. No one will EVER write perfect code. Doesn't matter if it some guy in his basement working on some open source project or some guy in Building 41 on Microsoft's Redmond Campus working on an MS OS kernel. joe -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darren Reed Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 1:29 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2
Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
On Thursday 12 August 2004 17:34, Harlan Carvey wrote: i agree that this is crap update. Ok. don't use windoze for anything serious, but a person familiar with windoze said sp2 breaks so much warez it is unusable. Just how useful is a phrase like breaks so much warez it is unusable? That was -if I'm reading Georgi correctly- i r o n y. -- Yes of course I'm sure it's the red cable. I guarante[^%!/+)F#0c|'NO CARRIER ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
Thanks for the tips (esp. Darren, the article at crn.com provided just the information I needed.). I ran the applicable uninstall program from within windows, and rolled back to sp1 (and all previously applied updates) flawlessly. I've read many people suggest that the service pack breaking things was somehow my fault. As you mention yourself, the problems are sporadic at best, so statistically I'd assumed I'd be just fine. This was not any sort of mission critical machine, just a personal game box. Ultimately what difference to an end user does it make if the applications are broken by a service pack install or a virus? I think the update provides some long needed changes to the fundamental operation of Windows, however if Microsoft knew of the potential problems via RC2 testing, I'd have thought they'd do a little more to rectify those problems than simply releasing and disclaiming. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not a member of the anti-ms bandwagon, but the number of issues I was having was quite frustrating. Thanks again for everyone's input. -Lee -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darren Reed Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 10:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help? In some mail from xtrecate, sie said: I made the mistake of installing SP2 last night, and I'm having some serious issues. Nearly every dialog box shows up blank, I am unable to set options and/or access program functionality in practically every application on this machine. Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? If I recall correctly, NT4sp3 was not long after NT4sp2. I wonder if we can expect an XPsp3 soon that deals with all the crap that XPsp2 brings upon us. Apparently it saved everything I need for a rollback, so I'm really looking forward to doing that. The catch: The 'Add or Remove Programs' feature no longer works. The window appears, but is blank. Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Have a read of this: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=239050 71 Darren ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
Title: RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help? Evidently XP SP2 breaks things outside of the box also, for example the Juniper Network NetScreen SSL based VPN: http://i.nl02.net/netline000s/?msg=msg.htm.txt&_m=26%2e106n%2e1%2els06p00imk%2e3 Otto
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
The people that should be blamed are the app makers. The beta has been out for a long time and I am sure that companines were fully aware of this update, the changes it makes, and how it will affect their products. If a company failed to make their program work with the OS that is on over 90% of the computers in the world, then that app company is to blame for sure. I am guessing that some in-house program will break. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of xtrecate Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2004 2:23 PM To: 'Darren Reed'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help? Thanks for the tips (esp. Darren, the article at crn.com provided just the information I needed.). I ran the applicable uninstall program from within windows, and rolled back to sp1 (and all previously applied updates) flawlessly. I've read many people suggest that the service pack breaking things was somehow my fault. As you mention yourself, the problems are sporadic at best, so statistically I'd assumed I'd be just fine. This was not any sort of mission critical machine, just a personal game box. Ultimately what difference to an end user does it make if the applications are broken by a service pack install or a virus? I think the update provides some long needed changes to the fundamental operation of Windows, however if Microsoft knew of the potential problems via RC2 testing, I'd have thought they'd do a little more to rectify those problems than simply releasing and disclaiming. Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not a member of the anti-ms bandwagon, but the number of issues I was having was quite frustrating. Thanks again for everyone's input. -Lee -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Darren Reed Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 10:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help? In some mail from xtrecate, sie said: I made the mistake of installing SP2 last night, and I'm having some serious issues. Nearly every dialog box shows up blank, I am unable to set options and/or access program functionality in practically every application on this machine. Windows XP SP2 has got to be up there with Windows NT 4.0 service pack 2 in terms of crap updates, possibly even worse. Maybe M$ are trying to push everyone away from Windows ? If I recall correctly, NT4sp3 was not long after NT4sp2. I wonder if we can expect an XPsp3 soon that deals with all the crap that XPsp2 brings upon us. Apparently it saved everything I need for a rollback, so I'm really looking forward to doing that. The catch: The 'Add or Remove Programs' feature no longer works. The window appears, but is blank. Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Have a read of this: http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=23 9050 71 Darren ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of xtrecate Ultimately what difference to an end user does it make if the applications are broken by a service pack install or a virus? None at all. But the user has control over installing service packs. And the user should have read the warnings BEFORE installing it, not after they discover something is broken. I think the update provides some long needed changes to the fundamental operation of Windows, however if Microsoft knew of the potential problems via RC2 testing, I'd have thought they'd do a little more to rectify those problems than simply releasing and disclaiming. Most of those problems are a result of a very simple problem. For certain security issues, it is possible to remain compatible with old, generally poorly written code, or to fix the security problem, but not both. There are some security issues that simply could not be fixed without creating compatibility issues. The data execution issue is one clear example; making blocks of memory allocated for data non-executable is a very effective way of preventing buffer overrun exploits from executing arbitrary code. The downside is that software (such as DivX) that intentionally tries to execute data won't work anymore. Given the choice between a secure system and a few badly written programs, I'd rather take the secure system and let the developers of those few programs that don't work due to lazy coding fix their products. Microsoft has in the past always taken the route of less security and more compatibility, and I, for one, think it's a good thing that their attitude has changed somewhat. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
RE: [Full-Disclosure] SP2 is killing me. Help?
Does anyone know of an alternate way to initiate a sp2 rollback? Try System Restore. I think you can get at it from booting with F8. ___ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
