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Wednesday, September 08, 2004
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9:04 PM
- Fun with Service Pack 2
I installed XP Service Pack 2 on my home PC last week. It seemed to work fine at first - there were minor compatibility problems, but nothing I couldn't fix.
Then I went away for the weekend, and when I came back, I noticed that my network properties no longer showed any adapters. The Internet still works, though, as long as I don't ever have to change my TCP/IP settings.
But I do occasionally like to do that! And I don't like when things fail mysteriously; sometimes it's the tip of the iceberg. I found some information online, including KB 825826, but nothing fixed it. I uninstalled SP2; it didn't come back. I performed a repair installation (which went into an infinite loop, but I was able to get past it). Even this did not bring back my network connections, although it did manage to break a few other things.
My network interfaces are still not listed in Device Manager, but do appear in the registry and the main one is in fact working. (The second one was disabled, so of course it does not appear in ipconfig.)
I removed the two NIC PCI cards (which of course caused XP to want to re-activate, which it couldn't do since there was no network connection), then rebooted, and re-inserted the main card, in hopes that plug-n-play would fix the problem. Alas, it didn't.
My advice: Unless your PC has a problem that SP2 is known to fix, steer clear of it!
Of course, I'm not following my own advice: I'm about to install SP2 again. It probably won't fix anything, but the damage is already done so I may as well have the latest.
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