Question : XP SP3 - Unmitigated Disaster

I am responsible for 11 PCs in our organization. I attempted to upgrade to SP3. After about 2 and 1/2 hours on the first system, I got the message "Access Denied." Turns out this problem is so well understood and documented that there is an article in the MS Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949377/.

Unfortunately, there recovery procedure looks like it will take posibile a dozen hours. It involves first a full download of SP3 and simply trying the upgrade again. This appears to be an exercise in futility. The article then explains a procedure which "will take a long time", to be followed by another upgrade attempt.

Until now I had been thinking that rather than go to Vista (which I would not do, so please do not suggest that), I would simply switch to Mac when forced to by the need to purchase hardware. I am now thinking that this is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and my switch to Mac may be sooner rather than later.

In the meantime, I am not sure what to do. I see the best choices as either forget about SP3, or proceed with the instructions in the KB article, as a "learning experience."

Answer : XP SP3 - Unmitigated Disaster

My 2 cents....

I have performed the manual procedure you are talkng about to reset the permissions. It really doea not take that long. The longest step is when it is resetting the permissions from the security database. Be aware tho, that at the end it may report an error. This can be safely ignored.

Out of curiosity tho... does the system boot? Can you do a system restore?