Dave-H

The .NET update seems to have installed fine for me with no problems. Scanning the versions of my .NET system files, it seems to have updated quite a few.

I wasn't knowingly pushed with KB4012864, no yellow shield appeared, but just as a test I tried doing a scan on Microsoft Update. Not only did it then appear as a high priority update, so I installed it from there, I was very pleased to find that the scan completed in only about 30 seconds. Whether this will be the same come the next patch Tuesday remains to be seen!

Thanks! Does that .NET update supersede any others, and why does it say it's a "preview"?

The strange thing was that after both my machines had been updated, a further scan on Microsoft Update with IE8 completed very quickly, and of course showed no critical updates available. Whether this means that the issue has been fixed remains to be seen of course!

LOL @ginz, I (and my PC) are fine thanks! I've just successfully updated both my XP installations with all 11 updates, and the Silverlight update. With Flash updates I usually wait now until Firefox tells me the plugin is now too old to use. My God the scans took such a long time though, I do hope they've finally fixed this issue this month, whatever it is! If this was happening with "real" POSReady/WindowsEmbedded installations, as well as hacked XP installations, MS must surely have had a huge number of complaints about it by now.

It won't be shown in the Windows Update list if you installed it manually from the standalone installation file. It should be listed in Add/Remove Programs though. Glad to hear we've actually got some updates this month, I guess we'll never know exactly why all of last months were pulled!

Ah, understood (I think!) So if the Firefox version being declared to the servers is 52.0, which it would be now if you left the variable as "%VERSION%, the plugin will never download as it's not offered on versions above 51, so you have to make sure it always still pretends to be version 51? I guess if you already have the plugin and you're still saying you're version 52, it just means you would never be offered any updates to the plugin, but I presume that's never going to happen now anyway!

Do you still need to do that if you've already got the plugin, or does it not matter in that case?

Yes, that's exactly what I've now got, all -1 hour on the times in the first image due to the time difference between the UK and mainland Western Europe.

Hence the inverted commas in my post!

Disgraceful, if they start putting forced advertisements into an operating system that many people must now have actually have paid for, I will not be pleased, and I will seriously consider "downgrading" as well.

Sorry I'm not sure how to check that. I have just run the updater again though, and my updroots.sst has changed, it's now dated 28/02/17 instead of 12/11/16, which is good, but strangely, my disallowedcert.sst is now dated 24/05/16 instead of 25/05/16 as it was before!

I've now got: authroots.sst 28/02/17 delroots.sst 12/11/16 roots.sst 24/07/15 updroots.sst 12/11/16 disallowedcert.sst 25/05/16 Does that look right? Of course I can't remember what the dates were before, I should have noted them, but authroots.sst seems to be the only obvious new one.

Yes, let's hope there's enough of us on their radar for them to justify keeping 52 ESR at least updated with security patches for another year or two.

NPAPI plugins don't work, except Flash, in the normal release version of Firefox 52, but they do in the ESR version. I don't know if there are any other important differences. Nice to see someone else likes their Windows XP to look like 98/2000 BTW!

Thanks, yes 52 ESR is now being offered for me too when I select "About Firefox" so it must have just taken a while to come through. EDIT: Now updated successfully. I did have to add several configuration options back to get the Adobe video plugin to work again, but it seems fine now. The first time I selected to update in the "About Firefox" dialogue, it just switched to the ESR channel, but didn't actually update, so I had to do it a second time, at which point it did.

I was only wondering because I read on a Mozilla support page somewhere that XP and Vista users would be "automatically" moved onto the ESR version of Firefox 52, so I assumed that it would just happen automatically as stated! I'll leave it a while to see if it does, otherwise I will probably just update manually as you suggest. Thanks, Dave.

My copy of Firefox 51.1.0 on Windows XP still says it's up to date if I check, but my copy of 51.1.0 on Windows 10 offered an update to 52.0. Is that expected behaviour, and will the ESR version of 52.0 not be offered by the update mechanism on XP? Should I just wait until it is or will I actually have to update manually on XP? I am using the 64 bit version on Windows 10 if that makes any difference.

OK. I'm now wondering if the apparent auto updating (and manual updating though the program) failures are because there is now a separate installation file for Windows XP. I have manually updated to version 7.33 now, but I'm afraid the problem isn't fixed, the display corruption is still occurring when the Windows XP menus are set to "scroll" mode. I have reported this on the Skype forum, but frankly I would be very surprised if it's now ever fixed.

Is automatic updating still working for you? It hasn't worked for me for the last few versions. It used to and just did the whole process automatically in the background. Now it doesn't seem to do this, even when there is a new version available. Now if I select Help>Check for Updates I get a notification that a new update is available, but when I select to download it, it apparently downloads, but every time it then says "Download of the Skype update failed" and if I want to update I have to go and download the installer manually. I've watched while this is happening, and the installer gets downloaded to the Windows temporary folder as it should do, but as soon as the download supposedly completes, the file just vanishes and the error message appears!

Please don't get disheartened Dibya, I'm sure this is not because people aren't enthusiastic about what you're trying to achieve here. The problem in these early days is that not that many people want to try modifying their existing setup and possibly compromising its stability just to be able to run a few relatively minor applications that probably not many people use anyway. When you get to the stage where the current versions of browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and things like Dropbox and Plex, are able to still be run on XP even though they are officially incompatible, then you will see interest really spike up I'm sure!

I guess that probably means that there will never now be another complete top to bottom rewrite of Windows, except possibly for a new professional/business only version of the OS, as NT was originally. When MS decided to move home users onto NT with Windows XP, they painted themselves into a corner a bit probably, because they now can't radically change the OS without potentially making a massive amount of hardware that's out there incompatible and obsolescent, which would be business suicide.

Wow, yes, big changes indeed! Thanks for the links. No wonder so much more recent software now won't run on XP. So I guess that despite the system files' versions all being changed from version 6 to version 10, Windows 10 isn't even now NT 7, letalone NT 10! I wonder now if there will ever be another major update to the underlying NT kernel, as MS are still maintaining that Windows will be called Windows 10 now forever, and if there is what form it will take. If they put out major updates that break compatibility with legacy hardware that's already running Windows 10, I think they would be hard pushed to continue calling the OS Windows 10.

Just as a matter of interest, was there a big change to the kernel between XP and Vista, when it went from NT5 to NT6?

LOL! Sorry I've been away for a while, but interesting to catch up with this thread. Obviously Windows 10 still provokes very passionate reactions from people! Interestingly I did for a very short while have a completely stripped down version of Windows 10 running on my netbook, whose graphics hardware has no Windows 10 driver support. I found out that the only way of running Windows 10 on it was to completely remove all the apps, which were causing the (Windows 7) graphics driver to crash, even on going to the desktop. So, I had a Windows 10 installation that was pretty much "bare" and it did work fine. I decided that there was no point in having Windows 10 if it was that stripped down though, and went back to Windows 8.1, which does work with the Windows 7 graphics driver apart from a few apps which do still crash it. I can't really comment on what Windows 10 does "behind the scenes" when it's being used, because I don't have the necessary technical knowledge, but from what's been said, updating all the system files from version 6.x to 10.x was presumably more than just a cosmetic change, and Windows 10 is actually a completely new version of Windows NT, like going from XP to Vista was (5.x to 6.x). If as a consequence of this it's doing things "under the bonnet" that previous Windows versions didn't, that's obviously a cause for concern and something to be aware of, but I only feel confident to comment on its usability rather than things like that. I don't actually have any real problem with the latest version of Windows 8.1, despite what I said before, once it's had the necessary tweaks. Certainly the original release of Windows 8 was pretty terrible I thought, way too biassed towards being used with touch screen devices, but fortunately 8.1 and its subsequent update did do a lot to address that. I don't know what Windows 10 is like in touch mode, I've never tried it, but I assume it goes back to being more like the original Windows 8. As I said, I've had no stability problems with Windows 10, perhaps I've been lucky! In fact editing with Adobe Premiere, the graphics driver (which was always the latest version) often crashed on me when dealing with difficult HD material when I was using 8.1. Since going to Windows 10 and updating to the Windows 10 driver, I haven't had a single crash, but that may well be due to other factors than the change of operating system of course! A few things I do miss from 8.1. I actually liked the way full screen apps opened next to each other, like clicking on a link in the e-mail app would open up the metro version of Internet Explorer in a split screen with it, which I actually thought was rather cool once I'd got used to it, especially if you've got a really big screen! I wish that more of the Windows 10 apps had a proper "full screen" mode. Some do but by no means all. The news app is better in 8.1 for one, it fills the whole screen and scrolls horizontally, much better than the the boring-looking Windows 10 windowed version IMO. I found the 8.1 "charms" a bit annoying sometimes, and still do on my netbook when using the touch pad instead of a mouse, where it's very easy to have them pop up when you don't want them. I'm sure there are ways to disable them, but it would be nice if disabling them was an official settings option. So, once I'd got Windows 10 looking the way I wanted it (as I said before, out of the box it looks awful IMO!) I was really quite happy with the way it looked. I was glad to find that the old Control Panel was still there, although I do use the new one a lot of the time and don't really have a problem with it. I do prefer it to the Windows 8.1 metro version. I like the fact that they restored the old Windows Backup facility, which they removed from Windows 8. I guess that was a bit of a sop to those who'd upgraded from Windows 7, but I guess it will now stay.