Yup. I finally bit the bullet and decided with all the hardware and driver changes that my system has had that it's time for me to do a reformat reinstall of my XP Pro SP2 on my desktop.

Everything went fine yesterday until I decided that to do updates. I always turn automatic updates to notify only. So I went to windows update to install updates. It installed V3.1 of the updater software, normal of course)

I rebooted and went back to windows updates. I downloaded all 108 updates to install. They downloaded fine, but would NOT install even one of them. I ran through the steps that Microsoft has outlined. I re-registered the DLLs and even downloaded and installed the updater manually. Still the same issue. I even cleared out the downloaded files and the cache (that didn't exist). It re-downloaded all the files, but it wouldn't install again.

Thinking I may have had some bad files, I ran an sfc /scannow to repair them all back to SP2 original. That ran. I rebooted and STILL had the same issue. I thought that this could've been the disc, but this disc has been used NUMEROUS times for installations, repairs, etc and it has worked.

I was tired, and decided I'd probably reload again, so I decided to try to install SP3, just to see if it will work. SP3 downloaded and installed right up. No problems at all. Now I still have an update for IE6 that will NOT install at all. It fails every time.

The problem is, I don't want SP3 right now, I'm trying to stay away until I'm sure that everything that I use and run is fully compatible and there are no real serious issues with SP3.

So, I'm here to pick your brains. Any other ideas on what to do/try to make this work? Personally I think this is a windows thing not liking the fact that I don't have SP3 installed.

Thanks!