It's after four in the morning and I have identified two updates that you should probably leave alone--at least on my cousin's 2.2 Ghz Pentium box. I've installed and uninstalled and reinstalled updates one at a time, just to be sure. I haven't had a problem with KB893086 as LouALOH reported, but KB890859 is responsible for the dreaded whirligig of endless restarts and KB893066 completely disables ethernet [NIC], makes Norton Antivirus start giving repeated Email Proxy (??) error messages and everything hangs for about two minutes on restart.
Your experience may differ. I've never had any problems with windows updates until now. I don't know if they are getting sloppy, or if XP has gotten so complex that they can't anticipate how updates will perform on individual computers. This is just a standard Dell Dimension 2400, so I surmise that potentially thousands of people are affected, or infected. At first I thought it was a hardware failure, but I tested both the hard drive and the memory before I started going through the updates one at a time.
Man, what a waste of time.
Thanks all for the help here.
Jerry
Edited by dxjnorto, 27 April 2005 - 04:25 AM.