Windows update causing explorer to crash

Today a set of updates were automatically installed 922819, 923191, 923414,
924191, 924496 on one of my Windows XP Pro sp2 machines. Now, immediately
after you log in to any account, explorer will crash and after you say ok or
cancel to the problem reporter that appears then Dr. Watson will also crash.
After that you cannot do anything on the desktop. There is no task bar and
no start menu and no popup menu on the right mouse button.

If you do a ctrl+alt+del you get the suhtdown dialogue and from there you
can get the task manager and from there you can run a program - such as "cmd"
to get a shell.

You can also connect to the C$ share from another computer on the LAN and
the files seem to be there.

I uninstalled the 5 updates by booting from the CD and using the repair
option and executing the relevant spininst.txt files, but this has not
changed the problem.

"butlercrew" wrote:

> Today a set of updates were automatically installed 922819, 923191, 923414,
> 924191, 924496 on one of my Windows XP Pro sp2 machines. Now, immediately
> after you log in to any account, explorer will crash ...
>
> ...I uninstalled the 5 updates by booting from the CD and using the repair
> option and executing the relevant spininst.txt files, but this has not
> changed the problem.
>

The next day I restarted the machine, checked that the problem was still
happening, and then spent about an hour copying files off it to another
machine in preparation for attempting a full XP repair or reinstall.

While the files were copying Windows update was fetching more updates. It
appears that it refetched the 5 updates that caused the problem in the first
place and which I had then removed. When I went to shut down the PC prior to
attempting the next repair from CD, Windows prompted me to install the
updates. So I said, "what the heck, the system's toast anyway" and let it.

Once the system had updated and rebooted everything had returned to working
again.

So I can only assume that something went wrong during Window's installation
of the updates on Oct 13, then because I had removed the offending updates
Windows reapplied them on Oct 14, and this time they were applied correctly.
Unless Microsoft modified the updates between Oct 13 and Oct 14...

The end for now.