I strongly recommend that all of you read my post on why editing your pending.xml file is a really bad idea: http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/archive/2011/03/11/why-you-don-t-want-to-edit-your-pending-xml-to-resolve-0xc0000034-issues.aspx
I know some of you are in bad situations and you dont have any other options available but this will leave your machine in an unservicable state which is going to lead to more problems down the road in regards to being able to actually install updates and fixes on the machine later in its lifecycle.
--Joseph [MSFT] http://blogs.technet.com/b/joscon/
Joscon, I don't see that it makes any difference in doing the pending.xml fix or the "official" method from Microsoft. I have done both on different machines, both say they are rolling the SP off the machine, and then both say they have SP1 loaded unde rcomputer properties although SP1 isn't really loaded and is in an unstable state. It doesn't show up in add/remove, and you can't manually install it because that will error out too.
What we need is an official fix from Microsoft to at least remedy the solution that doesn't really work found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/975484/en-us, and if you want to be nice to your customers, then you will fix the pending.xml hack that a lot of us did too.