KB935839 freezing W2K Server

I'm currently installing the monthly update batch on a W2K server (system
is set to download updates and notify when they're ready to be installed).


The first time I started installing it, the system turned off its power
supply all by itself, just seconds after beginning the install. It looks
like it didn't even shut down windows properly, it went too fast for a
normal shurdown.


After rebooting, the update icon re-appeared in the tray. I ran chkdsk
first to make sure the file system was still OK after the "shutdown", then
restarted the updates, and now it's just sitting there "installing" the
first upodate -- KB935839 -- but apparently doing nothing: no CPU use, no
disk activity, no network activity.

Despite looking as if it's doing nothing, it is all but freezing the UI.
Window updates on the desktop take tens of seconds to come through, even
changing from one active window to another by a simple mouse click on a
taskbar button or on a window's title bar takes at least 30 seconds.
CPU use remains at 0.

Launching task manager worked only through Ctrl_Alt_Del (and also took
abnormally long, 30 seconds before the buttons appeared, then 30 more
before task manager opened).

A right-click on the task bar to bring up the context menu to get to task
manager that way brought up no menu at all, not even after a full minute.


Anyone else with similar experience?

I killed update.exe, logged off and back on: the update icon reappeared in
the tray as expected.

Clicking it now showed 3 updates instead of 4, KB935839 was no longer
there, as if it was installed successfully.

The first of the remaining updates (Malicious Software Removal Tool)
installed/ran fine, with the second (BK933566) it's back to the same: UI
frozen, system apparently doing nothing at all.


Accessing the machine over the network (browsing a shared folder in file
explorer) is just as slow as the local UI: every mouse click takes tens of
seconds to process.


All the while task manager keeps showing 0% CPU use, there's no apparent
disk activity, nor network activity.

Other updates, same symptoms with today's update batch.

This morning it told me updates were downloaded and ready to be installed,
so I let it continue and just left the machine alone.

Right now, more than 4 hours later, it's still busy. Progress has
"already" reached the third of those updates.


The server isn't being used for anything else right now - a good thing,
because its speed is about half a minute for the first visual response to a
mouse click, and network access isn't much faster. Just tried to open
explorer: initially no apparent response, then the window popped up
(empty), and it took more than 5 minutes before the contents of drive C:
were shown.

And just like last time: no visual sign of disk access, network LED's show
almost no activity. I didn't start task manager to look at CPU use this
time, but I suppose that's still zero too, just like last month.



On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:58:23 +0200, Lucvdv <> wrote:

> I'm currently installing the monthly update batch on a W2K server (system
> is set to download updates and notify when they're ready to be installed).
>
>
> The first time I started installing it, the system turned off its power
> supply all by itself, just seconds after beginning the install. It looks
> like it didn't even shut down windows properly, it went too fast for a
> normal shurdown.
>
>
> After rebooting, the update icon re-appeared in the tray. I ran chkdsk
> first to make sure the file system was still OK after the "shutdown", then
> restarted the updates, and now it's just sitting there "installing" the
> first upodate -- KB935839 -- but apparently doing nothing: no CPU use, no
> disk activity, no network activity.
>
> Despite looking as if it's doing nothing, it is all but freezing the UI.
> Window updates on the desktop take tens of seconds to come through, even
> changing from one active window to another by a simple mouse click on a
> taskbar button or on a window's title bar takes at least 30 seconds.
> CPU use remains at 0.
>
> Launching task manager worked only through Ctrl_Alt_Del (and also took
> abnormally long, 30 seconds before the buttons appeared, then 30 more
> before task manager opened).
>
> A right-click on the task bar to bring up the context menu to get to task
> manager that way brought up no menu at all, not even after a full minute.
>
>
> Anyone else with similar experience?

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:53:09 +0200, Lucvdv <> wrote:

> Other updates, same symptoms with today's update batch.
>
> This morning it told me updates were downloaded and ready to be installed,
> so I let it continue and just left the machine alone.
>
> Right now, more than 4 hours later, it's still busy. Progress has
> "already" reached the third of those updates.

Finished - 6 hours to install 3 updates. That's probably longer than it
took the coders to write them.

On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:54:38 +0200, Lucvdv <> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:53:09 +0200, Lucvdv <> wrote:
>
> > Other updates, same symptoms with today's update batch.
> >
> > This morning it told me updates were downloaded and ready to be installed,
> > so I let it continue and just left the machine alone.
> >
> > Right now, more than 4 hours later, it's still busy. Progress has
> > "already" reached the third of those updates.
>
> Finished - 6 hours to install 3 updates. That's probably longer than it
> took the coders to write them.


Found what caused it: a bad sector in \WINNT\ocgen.log.

Confirmed by deleting the file and installing a bunch of optional updates
from the update site.


There were no other bad sectors anywhere, so it's probably caused by a
power glitch while writing to disk.

The 'spontaneous shutdown' when starting to install the updates, which I
mentioned last month, may even be responsible for it all. I still don't
know what caused the power supply to turn itself off then, maybe a second
after I clicked 'continue'.