Bad Windows; Bad !!

[dissent]

Haven't fired up my xp laptop in a number of weeks, so I recently connected and did some maintenance work, including going to Windows Update. It was about 30 updates, so you can see it's been a while. Any way, when she reboots, I get a bsod; a 0x50 error with a \"page fault in non paged area\". Safe Mode won't boot either. Trying to roll back to a previous good boot state also doesn't work; the error code shifts to 0x7e.

So I do a little poking around on the interwebs on my desktop. Some similar symptoms crop up in the aumha forums relating to one of the updates, namely the one from kb971486. So I follow the instructions there to fire up the Recovery Console and uninstall the 971486 update. *poof* The laptop boots up again just fine.

wtf?

anyone else have trouble with this update? all this bad juju was from back in mid October. One might think M$ would have solved this problem with their faulty update by now.

Aside from confirming why I don't do Automatic Updates, and the nasty note I'm shipping off to M$, are there any other lessons to be learned from this sad tale?

[Floyd]

Aside from confirming why I don't do Automatic Updates, and the nasty note I'm shipping off to M$, are there any other lessons to be learned from this sad tale?

wait for other people to evaluate updates (read: risk their installation)

[[]V[]essenjah]

Yep, updates=bad news bears many times. I've had these issues many times before.

[Grendel]

Aside from confirming why I don't do Automatic Updates, and the nasty note I'm shipping off to M$, are there any other lessons to be learned from this sad tale?

Might want to hold on to that note:

Had this same problem on a friend's computer...came up with the blue screen error after installing the update. The root cause of the problem is that there was a rootkit/trojan installed on the machine. Combofix was able to clean it and after that the update installed fine. If you have this problem, try running Combofix and some other anti-malware programs to fix the underlying problem. Backing out the MS patch will get the machine booting again but will not fix the real problem which is that you have a virus.

[Tunnelcat]

We got 'server error 403' on the most recent XP update when Microsoft tried to 'update' their update agent. Tried manually updating the wuweb.dll (it was an old version) file, etc., etc. and still no luck even getting INTO Windows Update. It's the third time they've screwed up that particular file (and the muweb.dll file too) since we've owned the machine.

You know what the solution was? All we had to do to get the update agent fixed was to turn ON 'automatic updates' and try again. Viola', it worked that time and Microsoft finally updated the wuweb.dll file to the newest version. Go figure. However, to be safe, we have again turned OFF good ol' Automatic Update since we STILL don't trust Microsoft to mess with the computer and NOT EFF IT UP any farther than we can throw them.

[Xamindar]

we have again turned OFF good ol' Automatic Update since we STILL don't trust Microsoft to mess with the computer and NOT EFF IT UP any farther than we can throw them.

As much as I hate M$, gotta say I don't think it is their fault that the updates mess up the machine. Whenever I have come across a machine that an update "broke" it was because that machine already had a virus or rootkit on it.

[TechPro]

The \"bug\" of getting the BSOD with that particular update only happened with some machines. Don't know if anyone ever figured out what combination of things on the user's system that results in that BSOD.

Here, it seems like almost no one at all has seen that.

[dissent]

Aside from confirming why I don't do Automatic Updates, and the nasty note I'm shipping off to M$, are there any other lessons to be learned from this sad tale?

Might want to hold on to that note:

Had this same problem on a friend's computer...came up with the blue screen error after installing the update. The root cause of the problem is that there was a rootkit/trojan installed on the machine. Combofix was able to clean it and after that the update installed fine. If you have this problem, try running Combofix and some other anti-malware programs to fix the underlying problem. Backing out the MS patch will get the machine booting again but will not fix the real problem which is that you have a virus.

Could be right Gren. I was discounting this as a possibility ..... until I ran Malwarebytes and found two instances of Trojan.TDSS. Have to see if removing these helps.