Installed SP4 and things have gone horribly wrong :(

[snotty2000]

Hi All,

Well I finally decided to put SP4 onto my system.

This may be of importance. I had a program called NetLimiter
installed, and I had un-installed it, but had not re-booted before
installing SP4. When I rebooted after SP4, the NetLimiter uninstaller
finished it's business.

Anyway, so I decided to head to windowsupdate to see what else was
needed, but explorer (V6.0) wouldn't load the site. Just loaded text.
Thought it was odd, so tried using Opera (V6 and 7) and Mozilla 1.4b,
but pages were either not loading at all, or the formatting was
royally screwed.

Thought I'd re-install ie6, and when it said I already had it, I chose
to re-install all components.

Still no joy.

So I thought I'd re-install SP4. No help

So I thought I'd download ie6 SP1. I download the setup file and when
it runs, it says it can't find a DLL, but just shows a single
character box (An unprintable character) instead of what DLL.

Other programs seem to be working fine, although I haven't done much
testing.

Any ideas on what the hell happened, and more importantly, how do I
fix it without having to re-install Win2k again?

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Dan Seur]

snotty - FWIW, the MS update site is under attack by the new msblast
virus, or soon will be, and others report it has been inaccessible for
hours now. I believe MS is working like crazy to protect the site from a
worldwide denial of service attack. the virus is new as of 8/11 and has
already spread across many thousands of unprotected machines.

One characteristic of the virus is that it has 2 flavors: W2k & XP. When
the wrong version hits a machine (it's a random process) that machine
crashes. With the right version, the infected machine shows no symptoms
except a very busy internet connection as it prowls the net to replicate
through available ports elsewhere.

I use F-Secure Antivirus, and they issued a signature database update
late yesterday. Fortunately, their "backweb" update facility checks
constantly for such updates, not just once or twice a day, and does so
with virtually no overhead (subsecond transaction) unless there's an
update to download.

What's happened to the rest of your system, I can't say, sorry. Hope
this helps.