SP2 and Media Center Add-Ins oddities

Well, had a bizarre experience with upgrading MCE 2004 to SP2 yesterday...

I installed SP2 and didn't seem to have any problems. I then uninstalled and
upgraded WinDVD to the newest version. Still no problems. Then, inside Media
Center, I decided to run mceWeather, by some guy in Germany. Wham...major
problems.

Basically, the system hung. Hitting the Windows key finally showed me the
menu, and the Zone Alarm popup of mceWeather requesting net access. I
allowed it, but the system still hung. Finally did the 3-finger salute
(ctrl-alt-del) and managed to kill Media Center.

At that point, I figured that maybe ZoneAlarm was conflicting with SP2's
builtin firewall, so I tried to uninstall it. Every time I attempted to
uninstall Zone Alarm, the system would reboot. No BSOD, just an outright
reboot. When it came up, I had a notice (the MS error reporting) that talked
about massive system failure (yeah, I'd consider a reboot a massive system
failure) and how it was because of a device driver. Of course, it didn't say
which one. It had a link that told me how to find out which driver, but that
required a BSOD with a specific STOP message...I didn't have that.

Finally, I went to System Restore and restored to the day before. Cool...no
more problems. Sort of. I was able to uninstall Zone Alarm then. However,
the WinDVD product was in an indeterminate state - it had remains of version
3, but not enough remains to uninstall version 3. It also had version 6 but
didn't know about it from the menu. Finally I just deleted the whole
InterVideo program tree and reinstalled version 6.

Now the only thing remaining was mceWeather, which refused to uninstall. I
again deleted its program tree. In the process, I found that it loads
something called cbServer, which also was giving me problems as it was in
the startup group.

Finally, I reinstalled SP2. This time, I don't seem to have any problems,
but I'm wondering what leftover bits may someday bite me. Worst case I guess
I'll nuke the whole system and reinstall, but I'd rather not do that just
yet. Time will tell how stable it is.

Dana Cline - MVP

 

Here is a list of softwares that might have problems with SP2. I'm not sure
if I'm going to download it...

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;884130

 

Jean,

Thanks for that list...I hadn't seen it before. It's HUGE! And I notice a
lot of MS software on it, such as recent versions of Office, Outlook, Visual
Studio. Also most antivirus packages and firewalls, including the ZoneAlarm
I had problems with. Wish I'd seen this before I upgraded...

It's really gonna be a problem for my son as he has a lot of the games
mentioned. Fortunately I haven't upgraded his box yet.

Too bad MS doesn't tell us exactly _what_ in their software doesn't work the
same under SP2...

Dana Cline - MVP

 

For the most part, anything that requires a listening port will be impacted
by the Windows XP SP2 firewall.
That probably makes up a majority of the cases...

 

Then I guess that begs the question...why does Office or Visual Studio
require a "listening port"? And if it does, wouldn't the firewall notify me
and allow me to enable it for that app?

Dana Cline - MVP

 

The firewall will. If those listen for inbound traffic, the firewall
will ask you if you want to allow access.
--
__________________________________________________________________________________
Ed Hansberry (Please do *NOT* email me. Post here for the benefit of all)
What is on my Pocket PC? http://www.ehansberry.com/
Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices www.pocketpc.com
What is an MVP? - http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/