On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 14:53:31 -0600, "Jupiter Jones [MVP]"
Then I hope you are checking.
Many of the issues involve 3rd parties.
It is up to them and not Microsoft to solve issues with their
software. Most reported issues have already been resolved.
Depends. Seems as if mileage groups as:
1) Installation of death
Unlikely outcome, but has affected some 865/875 systems at least,
including my 875P and Cari's 865xx. She came up with the way out;
disable L1 and L2 cache, run XP, uninstall SP2, enable L1 and L2 cache
again. Took about 5 hours, but worked.
While you may consider this a 3rd-party problem, it is nonetheless a
clash between the OS and the system level that the OS is expected to
conform to. So no, I do not expect the hardware vendors to fix this
on MS's behalf; I expect the OS to work on the hardware.
2) Installs fine, some apps break
I'd expect this to be common. Apps that break may do so because they
do things that MS formerly encouraged, but now (rightly, IMO) consider
to be "unsafe hex". These are things like peer-to-peer file sharers
etc. that expect external PCs to initiate network traffic.
Another class of apps that break, do so because they may get tangled
up with similar functionalities in SP2, e.g. firewalls.
Several antivirus apps are listed as "challenged", and I suspect it's
usually one of two issues. Some may not be detected by the Security
Center, which may then squawk there's no av in place. This is a
relatively trivial issue, but because it involved retail-monster
Norton AV, we have all got to hear about it.
More significant are avs that can no longer do resident scanning, and
I suspect this may be to do with NX (No eXecute) that AMD64 supports.
As a way of detecting encrypted/polymorphic viruses, an av may copy
file code into its own memory and emulate it there; if that is
executing code in a data area, SP2's NX awareness will bite.
Other apps unrelated to firewalls, av, and networking, may also break
for various reasons. I dunno why Nero broke, but I can expect apps
that followed MS advice to leverage IE as the UI will break, given
these apps are likely to rely on lax "My Computer" zone security.
Several accounting apps such as QuickBooks may fail here.
Yes, I'd expect these 3rd-party issues to be fixed by the 3rd-parties,
assuming a simple set of manual settings doesn't do the job. Still,
the big picture is reason to be cautious about advocating blind SP2
deployment; an installation may be safer with working av than with SP2
and an av that is no longer scanning events in real time.
3) Installs fine, no problems
This is likely the most common mileage, but having 99% of users tell
you they are fine does nothing to help the 1% who are not.
SP2 is almost a new OS, and I'm wondering whether some sort of
"designed for SP2" logo campaign may be appropriate
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Reality is that which, when you stop believing
in it, does not go away (PKD)
