Major SP4 Issue - Please Help

[Gary]

Hi, I work for a College and we have a large number of
Windows 2000 PC's running in a domain environment (W2K
Servers - Active Directory).

When we install new PC's we tend to apply every critical
update there is going from the Windows Update site.
Recently after installing SP4 on these PC's we have found
that a problem not too disimilar to knowledge base article
Q327984 occurs (Registry Keys not unloading so roaming
profile cannot update to server).
Now this article says that by installing the latest
service pack solves the problem..... it doesn't, SP4
actually causes this problem for us!!! After investigation
I tried copying the files listed in that article (mostly
to do with the print spooler) from a SP3 PC to a few of
the SP4'ed PC's and this does fix the problem.

Want I wanted to know is if Microsoft had any plans to
produce a fix for this, or maybe there is a fix I've
missed? (don't think so though)
The other problem is coping the files in question across
to a PC isn't as easy as it sounds, because access is
denied because they are in use. I have tried stopping all
services relating to this to no avail. The only way I have
found to do this is shove the hard disk in as a slave in
another PC - but this is a total hack and as we have about
30 PC's with this problem this is totally unacceptable to
do!

Please, please, please can anyone help me on this matter.
I would be extremely grateful..............

 

[GA]

First and most important question would be: when you installed SP4, did you
select the backup option? If you did, you should simply be able to roll
back the installation to SP3 on all machines until you have tested SP4 and
gotten it to work on test machines.

 

[Gary]

Rolling back doesn't make any difference!!! whatever
changes in the SP4 install process stays that way.... I'd
already tried that and found it didn't work.

It's problems like this that push me further & further
towards the Linux camp. Isn't the term "Microsoft Patch"
just a tad ironic don't you think?

 

[GA]

Sounds like there is something else going on besides SP4. Did you install
other patches at the same time?
As for copying the dll files to multiple pcs, there are many ways to do
this. You could use a batch file in a login script. If you do this, you
might want to include lines which also register the dlls using regsvr32. You
could also create a quick and dirty msi file and deploy it via GPO.
BTW, have you thought about mandatory profiles rather than roaming? It
would make life MUCH easier for you.

 

[Gary]

If only it was that easy! You can't copy them because they
are in constant use - I've tried stopping several related
services to no avail. I always get an "access denied"
message saying the files are in use.
Putting the drive in as a slave device in another PC was
the only way I could achieve copying the files.... and
doing that with 30-odd SP4 ruined PC's is totally
unacceptable.

As for roaming vs mandatory profiles, we have two separate
domains here - one for students & one for staff (we do
this for security/hacking reasons, students just LOVE
fiddling) and on the student side with over 1500 user
accounts we do only use mandatory profiles which does make
life soooooo easy. On the staff side i'd love to go to
mandatory profiles & in a lot of general departments I
have, but there are quite a few users where mandatory
profiles just aren't feasible............ all good
thoughts and I do appreciate you suggesting them but I've
been there, done that, got the Microsoft t-shirt and taken
it straight back again after realising it was shoddly made
& way too overpriced!