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1. What did you guys do to fix applications that were broken by SP2, or how did you prevent that from happening?

2. I've heard from a certain z00b that SP2 is bloatware (compared to WinXP SP1). Is this true?

Thanks. ^_^

So far everything works for me.

ditto.

SP2 fubared most of my puter.
StyleXP required an update, my firewall seemed to have problems, that pop-up blocker in IE was annoying as hell and I couldn't view any media without disabling my firewall completely.
I tossed SP2.

Defender wrote:SP2 fubared most of my puter.
StyleXP required an update, my firewall seemed to have problems, that pop-up blocker in IE was annoying as hell and I couldn't view any media without disabling my firewall completely.
I tossed SP2.

and are now doing what? Using linux I hope?

if not,you can turn off your window's firewall(id recommend it), and nab a good firewall like KPF, and not use IE as a browser.

Nero 6 and StyleXP needed updates, Norton Systemworks 2004 and Zonealarm had no problems. I use ZA so I disabled the Windows firewall, and I dont use IE6 except in very rare cases so the popup blocker isnt an issue.

Regarding the bloatware, there was an article posted here somewhere that looked at what impact sp2 had on games and the results were inconclusive.

Overall, pretty troublefree after the required software updates.

Neo wrote:1. What did you guys do to fix applications that were broken by SP2, or how did you prevent that from happening?

I've yet to personally encounter anything broken by installing SP2. If SP2 breaks your windows install, then you've done something to fudge up windows to begin with. I've installed SP2 on multiple machines and not a single one of them has encountered any major issues. I've had to kill the "security center" service because it would nag about not having a firewall installed (perma-enabled by NSW2004 if you don't install their bloated POS firewall and contrary to popular belief, disabling that alert in the security center WILL NOT shut it up.) on all the machines, but thats about it. Your older applications may run slightly different, but thats the only thing you might notice. Just because a piece of software is listed on that article doesn't mean it won't work. That just means that MS doesn't guarantee that it will run perfectly.

2. I've heard from a certain z00b that SP2 is bloatware (compared to WinXP SP1). Is this true?

SP2 makes XP run slightly different, yes. More bloated? Hell no. Matter of fact, my machine runs slightly faster WITH SP2 installed. If you installed the uxtheme.dll crack (to allow you to run third-party themes without special software), you'll have to update that (or the theme service will crash everytime) for sure. Click me (mirrored since the original site is gone/moved)

MD-2389 wrote:I've had to kill the "security center" service because it would nag about not having a firewall installed (perma-enabled by NSW2004 if you don't install their bloated POS firewall and contrary to popular belief, disabling that alert in the security center WILL NOT shut it up.)

Maybe true if you dont have any firewall installed, but Systemworks (sans Norton firewall) plays nice with Zonealarm and Security Center sees ZA as my firewall. It shut up for me pretty good when I unchecked the boxes under "Change the way Security Center alerts me," I dunno what alert you were talkin about.

Vindicator wrote:

MD-2389 wrote:I've had to kill the "security center" service because it would nag about not having a firewall installed (perma-enabled by NSW2004 if you don't install their bloated POS firewall and contrary to popular belief, disabling that alert in the security center WILL NOT shut it up.)

Maybe true if you dont have any firewall installed, but Systemworks (sans Norton firewall) plays nice with Zonealarm and Security Center sees ZA as my firewall. It shut up for me pretty good when I unchecked the boxes under "Change the way Security Center alerts me," I dunno what alert you were talkin about.

Try running it with Kerio (NOT recognized as a firewall by SP2) and then say that.

kerio was updated after XP2 was release, which basically disabled windows firewall anyway.

Seriously though, all software companies had plenty of warning when Sp2 was to be released and access to beta's for patch development. For those companies who waited until after Sp2 was released to see if their software had any issues = a company I would be weary about purchasing from.

I noticed quite a few compaines where on the ball, day sp2 was mentioned to be available they already had their patches ready and waiting for customer download.

if you havent already slipstream your Windows XP Pro/Home with SP2

KPF worked fine, its that windows Security centre was incapable of seeing it when SP2 was released, same with AVG.

Two products that didn't not suffer any suffer any ill effects in functionality with in the install of SP2, but users were led to belive they didn't work by MS's update. Was that MS's or grisoft/Kerio's fault?

An interesting question to ponder.

fliptw wrote:

Defender wrote:SP2 fubared most of my puter.
StyleXP required an update, my firewall seemed to have problems, that pop-up blocker in IE was annoying as hell and I couldn't view any media without disabling my firewall completely.
I tossed SP2.

and are now doing what? Using linux I hope?

if not,you can turn off your window's firewall(id recommend it), and nab a good firewall like KPF, and not use IE as a browser.

I do use Linux (Fedora Core 2) and I did turn off the firewall (it's the first thing I did).

Yeah, that's what I thought. I didn't notice any bloat with SP2. And the z00b claims that I don't know how to operate a PC. =P

Some of my apps were broken, though. Trillian froze every time I closed it; it was an old version of trillian anyway. I wasn't using the Windows Firewall, because I'm behind two hardware firewalls and a software firewall (Norton), but I think it's a novel idea. ^_~ Winamp keeps freezing every once in a while even after I removed SP2. When I went back to SP1, I had to plug up all the holes myself to no benefit (remember when I had a problem with svchost?), since SP2 has no bloat, just as I thought. ^_^

I did a fresh install of Windows after my RAID troubles, nothing broken with SP2 at all and as I'm a lazy bugger the SP2 firewall is actually pretty good... got a DMZ machine that is on 24/7 that is only protected by the SP2 firewall... no troubles in the last month...

The only problem is if NAV is disabled for any reason, I get a pop up every 5 seconds to say that it's not working. Which makes it damn well near impossible to reactivate again when all the PC wants me to do is stare at error messages...

Go into the SP2 security center and tell it to use Norton as the AV. My Norton works fine.

SP2 has performed like a champ on this box. I'm even running an XP pro install that was an upgrade from Win2k and have yet to need a reformat (though thats coming shortly).

I use both a hardware firewall and the software firewall and the only thing that bugs me is when the firewall keeps asking me to unblock programs that need access to the net. No big deal though, you just specify them in the firewall first and then no pop-up window

SP2++!!

I just did a fresh install of sp2. Everything works great. I just turned off the security service and all the other sp2 crap and everything runs great. As far as bloatware, I have less services running with sp2 than I did with sp1.