Hello all. This one is kind of long but it is necessary to give background and What I have tried to this point. I have been reading through the posts and have not found the answer that I was looking for, or I did not understand if I did, so I thought that this would be a better way to find the answer. I work as a PC Technician for a Healthcare products company and the PC that I use was chosen to test Service Pack 2 before we roll out to the other PCs in places like Engineering and Payroll. The computer in question is a Dell Optiplex, GX260, P4 2.66, 512 DDR and a Dell Motherboard. Windows XP Pro 2002 SP 1 from dell. OK, so I ran Adaware 6, with the latest defs, I have Symantec Client Security version 9 in a Managed Environment - all reported clean. I created a Restore Point just to be on the safe side and backed up my log files that were not on the network share. I then downloaded the SP2 Distro for IT rollout and ran the installation for it. Everything seemed to be running fine untill the restart, where we go down hill from there. Where before my pc only took about 2 mins to powerup and be ready to work, that included mapping the network drives, now it takes 15 mins. Half of my services are non functional, they do not start no matter what their start up status is and they can not be started maually. Print Spooler, Cryptographic services, RPC all of that minor stuff no longer functions. Windows Firewall is not installed and can not be installed because the Cryptographic service can not verify the installer CRC. After about an hour of trying to figure out what went wrong I decided to uninstall SP 2 and then try it again. It was at this point that I discovered that the Uninstall Wizard does not function. The wizard gets to the point where it says "Restoring Cataolgs" and encounters a critical error - File can not be found. I attempted to unistall by going to c:\windows\ntuninstalsp\unistalsp\unistalsp.exe only to have the same error. Can not find the specified file. OK, I then attempted to boot into safe mode and run system restore. only to have the following error come up: "System Restore in unable to protect your PC, please restart windows and try again. " This error comes up in safe mode and normal mode. After searching this site, microsoft, and dell, I contacted dell to see if they had any words of wisdom. Maybe I just was not holding my mouth right. They were of no help either saying that you have already done everything that we would have you do. Call Microsoft's Service pack 2 help line. OK! So I call them and mr. Technical support Professional listens to the above explaination, asks about the windows firewall again and then places me on hold. When he comes back he states that what I have is a failed install of SP2 and we are going to have to force the uninstallation of the Service pack through Recovery Console on the CD. REALLY???!!!! I never would have guessed that. OK, I cant do that at this point in time because low and behold I discover that there is a backup program that runs on my computer that does not run anywhere else. Mr. Technical Support Professional states that a forced roll back should not destabalize the system but he can not make any guarntees. So I have said all that to ask the following question. Does anyone have even the slightest clue as to what the &(*&*(& is going on? Because even thought I am an MCP for XP Pro I am unfortunatley clueless as to the cause of this current delima. And more to the point I can not use my PC in its current state so I have to either uninstall SP 2 and hope that everything functions or wipe everything out, reinstall and go from there. Did I skip a step somewhere or is this on of the 10% computer problems they were talking about?
