Dave-H

Interesting, I always assumed that MS Update looked at the file versions on the system to determine if an update was needed, perhaps it doesn't! I'll give it a try, it would be nice to have a "clean" MS Update without the nag that I've hidden an important update.

Thanks @heinoganda, I've applied the new batch file, I'll keep an eye on the event logs and see what happens. I don't really want to remove the POSReady key, although with the end of updates I'm wondering whether it is really now necessary to keep it! Cheers, Dave.

You can't enable multi process with just that setting, the others mentioned earlier in the thread have to be set as well, especially browser.tabs.remote.force-enabled which overrides the fact that multi process is specifically disabled on XP systems. Look in your Windows Task Manager, if there is only one firefox.exe process running, it's not enabled. I wouldn't worry about the plugin container process, at least on my system it only runs when I visit a site that uses Flash. I can't see that there would be any great advantage in disabling it unless you have a bad resource shortage problem. It does keep the browser more stable, as before it was introduced a crash in a plugin could take the whole browser down!

Indeed so, and surely if you put the old MSO.DLL back, Microsoft Update will just nag you to install the patch again?!

KB4462223 is the latest broken update, from April. KB4461614 is an older version, not that this helps at all of course!

Yes, download and install the patch!

Thanks @heinoganda, that explains it all very well. I'll keep an eye out and hope that the error messages stay away! I'm hoping that changing that registry setting will stop MSE from constantly checking with the MS update servers.

A very good question!

I use two graphics cards on my triple boot system, because one of them has no Windows 98 drivers, and the other one has no Windows 10 drivers! I use the very wonderful Nirsoft's Multi-Monitor Tool to switch between them on Windows XP, which I can do at will. I have shortcuts set up for that, and it might be possible to run a shortcut on startup to always select the right card via the tool. Just a thought, it does seem a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but it might just work!

@heinoganda has built a more up to date version of HTTPSProxy that works on XP. A lot of us are using it. PM him to ask about it.

It seems to be fine. IE8 with HTTPSProxy.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't. Although the article doesn't specifically mention Vista, it does say that only 8.1 and 10 aren't affected.

The only symptom of the problem in 52 ESR seems to be that if you look at the add-ons list it says that they can't be verified for use in Firefox. They carry on working just fine! In Firefox 66 they actually all stopped working as they had been blocked!

I suspect they're the same thing, I downloaded the two files, and they are only 4 bytes different in size!

Thanks!

@heinoganda I did a check today on Microsoft Update just on the off-chance that there might be something offered, and the only thing offered was a definition update for MSE. I tried installing it and it failed of course, and when I looked in my update history there was a long list of similar update failures. Also I'm still getting error messages in my Windows event logs all the time about failed updates and MPSampleSubmissions. Sadly your previous fix seems to have only been temporary. I noticed in the registry an entry at HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\MICROSOFT ANTIMALWARE\SIGNATURE UPDATES called "ForceUpdateFromMU". It was set to "1", I've tried setting it to "0". Do you think that will help? Basically I want it to stop checking for updates by the normal route. I'm actually a bit surprised that MU is still offering definition update for MSE on XP at all!

I don't see why you have problems with Firefox sync. Mine works fine with default settings, and always has done. Is this a downside to setting a global user agent string? I use an add-on to change the string just on troublesome sites, and have left everything else well alone!

I know I promised i wouldn't mention it again, but just quickly for comparison, Firefox 66 on Windows 10 managed it in 44.79 seconds. Much much better than FF 52 on XP, but still pretty bad compared with it seems all other browsers! So, it looks like a general problem with Firefox, all versions seem to underperform badly on these tests compared with other browsers.

FWIW, today's update KB4464567 is safe, it doesn't replace MSO.DLL.

I've had an Office 2010 update (which didn't break Office again thank goodness) so I guess that's it!

Try - Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36 That's my custom user agent string of choice at the moment (which I got from a post on MSFN needless to say!) Give that a try.

Interesting test. Google Chrome 49 managed it in 11.16 seconds. Opera 36 managed it in 11.76 seconds. Firefox 52 ESR managed it (eventually) in......... wait for it......... 380.18 seconds!! I thought it was never going to finish on Firefox. It took over six minutes! Something must be seriously amiss here surely?!

Well I tried Firefox 66 on Windows 10 again, and still get only 60fps on the test. It's set to its default automatically determined configuration, with hardware acceleration on and a maximum of 8 processes (which is the default). It's still massively out-performed by IE11 and Edge. Off topic for this thread of course, but a very strange anomaly. EDIT: Actually I've now done some more tests, and sometimes FF 66 on Windows 10 goes as high as 170fps, but I'll then try again and it's around 40fps! No consistency to it at all. Anyway, off topic so I'll concentrate just on FF 52 on XP from now on, I promise!

Indeed it will, I have the British English one installed!

No problems seen here on Firefox 52 ESR with Flash or any other plugins or add-ons (touch wood!)