SP2 Update

[Clp727]

Have any of you had the shear pleasure of updating clients that are running XP Pro to SP2?
We decided against it for now. It takes about 2 hrs to complete, and the risk that it will hose up the system is tremendous. We had to reinstall the OS on two client machines after the upgrade. Whats worse, we do all of our work through a remote connection. If the SP2 upgrade is a success, we have to walk out to the client and dissable the firewall.
We had read a couple of articles that stated that most businesses (I think 2/3) have avoided this particular service pack.
We just became one of them.

[Voltage Spike]

I'm certainly not an expert on Microsoft tools in an enterprise environment, but you may be interested in this article that claims Microsoft is disabling the "blocking tool" that prevents Automatic Update from installing SP2.

[TheCotMan]

Have any of you had the shear pleasure of updating clients that are running XP Pro to SP2?

There have been problems. Most problems we found are with people having machine infected with malware such as trojans, adware, spyware, viruses, or worms. Others have to do with software/drivers not designed to work with Windows XP. For some of these, avoiding problems just meant upgrading non-MS software before applying SP2. The last group, were people who had crappy hardware or hardware with poor driver support.

We had read a couple of articles that stated that most businesses (I think 2/3) have avoided this particular service pack.
We just became one of them.

There are a number of holes in XP without SP2. The list of hole will grow. The list of worms will grow. Eventually, the cost of an upgrade will be cheaper than service calls for security issues, and the upgrade will happen anyway. You can choose to pay now, or pay later-- if you pay later, there will be a service charge for "late fees." ;-)

[Clp727]

I have read the article about SP2 and the auto update. Our supervisor has this "No auto-update policy", so we have to disable that feature on all of the client machines.
I believe that our hardware definately has issues. Most of the client machines have small hard drives, some only have a 4 gig drive. Those computers have some software on the local drive, but the data lives on the servers. When we initially started updating the XP machines with the small drives, we got the download complete on the first computer, then we got the error message that there was not enough drive space. That is simply our fault, not SP2. Our boss has a budget to work with...and soon those machines will be replaced. But, as most of you know, we have to operate within the budget.
The two computers that I spoke of earlier, that had to have the OS reinstalled...they were micron PCs. They have intell chipsets, P4 processors, and large drives. The OS was a fresh install prior to the SP2 upgrade. I honestly don't know why they failed.
Our Win. 2000 machines have no issues what so ever.
This SP2 is really frustrating. I realize the security risk involved, but for now our company has put that one on hold.