[gui-talk] Win XP SP3 installation failure

[Joel Deutsch]

I went to the Microsoft Updates page by clicking on the link under Tools in 
my IE 7. I was asked to install an update to my Windows Update manager 
before proceeding, which I did. So far, so good. Then I initiated the 
download and installation of the service pack, as directed, including 
something on a second screen that I found only by accident Alt tabbing 
around to see if I'd left any applications running. I hadn't, it turned out, 
and this other page was waiting for me to say yes to some other, related 
procedure that had to happen after SP3 was downloaded but before it could be 
installed.

Okay, still everything's going ahead fine, and I heard a progress bar 
reporting the progress of the installation.

But then I got this big boom error sound, and the only message in the 
dialogue was Access Denied, and a button to click for OK. No alternative, so 
I clicked it.

Now a dialogue came up asking me to start an uninstall Wizard or something 
of the sort. Again, I had no alternative, so I clicked OK and eventually it 
uninstalled everything it had been installing and reconfigured the registry, 
and everything. Looked very responsible.

Then I got a dialogue saying all this was finished, and that SP3 had failed 
to be installed, and asking me to allow it to restart my computer. Which 
worked fine, though Jaws took a year and a half to say it was ready.

Well, nowhere in these dialogues, which I inspected with the Jaws cursor to 
see if I could find text that I hadn't heard, there was no indication of 
what the problem was that caused this all to happen.

Has anyone else experienced this? Any idea how I might diagnose it and set 
things straight?

thanks.
the Virutal recongifired recongifured clciked someting anoher Deinied 
efverything's proceudre pprocedure procdure hes toidd.