SP2 (Windows Service Pack 2)

Windows SP2 was originally just supposed to be a simple patch, but instead, Microsoft decided to try to include some of the security enhancements meant for Longhorn. They did manage to increase security, but also broke some applications. Although most of that breakage is probably just poor understanding of firewall issues, some application vendors have been recommending that their customers NOT install SP2. That, coupled with the fact that SP2 just about replaces the entire OS and thus requires high speed access for any reasoble download, has caused an adoption rate estimated to be less than 50%.

That's not good. Until very recently, Microsoft helped that along by allowing people to tell Windows Update not to download SP2. That's been disabled, but unfortunately you can still tell it not to install. Because of all the FUD surrounding this, too many people will probably do just that, leaving them without important security updates.

As I said, most of the application problems are really non-issues that can be easily fixed with the firewall configuration. To its credit, Microsoft has a tool to help test application problems. Unfortunately, almost any application glitch is apt to get blamed on SP2, so I suspect that deployment will remain low.

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