It is time to stop publishing SP1.
This is yet the worst problem, but installing SP1 fails on such a huge amount of machines for completely different reasons.
The right way would be: Stop publishing SP1, fix those huge amounts of various problems why either SP1 renders the machines unusable, or why SP1 failes to install and reverts back, and publish SP1a once the issues are fixed.
On the non-company machines within my reach I have about 15% to 20% which cannot install SP1, only when doing the hard "in-place-upgrade" way. Another 15% to 20% require a lot of hard work to make SP1 install without the in-place upgrade way. Only a small amount of the users are "heavy windows modifiers", most of them do nothing special.
Company machines are less affected, but they failed too.
And now this which failes on a lot of company machines, this is the "hey, now it is getting _really_ critical" level where microsoft cannot state that only a few users who play around with their machines privately are affected. This is the "worse than virus infection" level since viruses of today do not render the machine dead.
Please: Stop SP1, tame that bitch, release SP1a.
hi ,what people need to do is understand what they are talking about , .... and follow instructions ! half of the comps are infected with who knows what and then they wonder they cant install anything ?
there are people who install it on vista , .....
now if people first take a look at whats inside sp 1 , maybe they would see that its not that whats causing problems , ...
on the other hand are all the computers that have no problem what so ever , ...
1000 plus and only two errors , one due memory burned and one due to power loss , .... both fixed within the hour , ...
but there is no forum for people who have managed to succeed , ... !!
oh and both under all four seven versions !
have a nice day
Your users seem to differ from mine: Only those running Windows 7 tried to install SP1, none of the XP and Vista users tried to run Sp1. None of the affected machine got viruses. None of the affected machines got hardware problems. The worst the affected machines have are two or three toolbars, Google toolbar (thanks google, I think bundled with java), Yahoo toolbar (thanks adobe flash), Ask-toolbar (thanks PDF creator).
Only a hand full (less than ten) of the SP1-completely-fail users are among those who dig deeper into the system, and their wording is: "Well, it was acting strange before, I needed to reinstall anyway." - and they do so and solve their problem that way and don't ask me to help.