Dave-H

Looking at that article, I can't see any reason why the same procedure wouldn't work on XP SP3.

That's not great, as IIRC Microsoft's answer for this sort of problem is to completely uninstall all .NET versions and reinstall them all from scratch, in order, which is a very lengthy undertaking! Why can't you uninstall .NET 2.0 as a matter of interest? There is certainly an uninstall option present in Add/Remove Programs on my system.

So if the yellow shield is still telling you that updates that you've already apparently successfully installed are still needing to be installed, what happens if you do a "custom" scan on the website? Does that tell you they still need to be installed too, even though they are in the installed updates list as already being successfully installed?

Thanks, I have deleted my archived copies of the installation files for KB3035488 and KB2972105. All the others I have still seem to be relevant. I didn't have a file for KB2863239.

How are you installing the updates, by clicking on the yellow shield or by going to the update site using Internet Explorer? I've often found that if I do it from IE, the yellow shield still reappears and prompts me to install updates that are already installed, which I check by scanning again on the website. Eventually the shield goes away, but it can take some time! Occasionally it goes away as soon as another scan is done on the website.

Yes, a great shame about Slimjet, as I had started to use it and really liked it. It even still supported NPAPI plugins like QuickTime up until version 10, based on Chromium 50, which I'm still using. The next version 11 (Chromium 51) will still work on XP but has dropped NPAPI plugin support, and as said the next version after that (12) will no longer run on XP. I actually wish they'd dropped both NPAPI plugins and XP at the same time, and kept the last version that supported both updated with security fixes but no new enhancements, and I've said that to them in their forum.

All installed fine here. Amazed to suddenly see so many .NET 2.0 updates, and one rather large .NET 3.0 update after all this time. I had assumed that at least 2.0 was actually no longer supported! How many of those nine (!) .NET updates actually replace updates that some of us have offline installation files saved for?

Yes indeed Den, I was just following up on the suggestion from @xpclient that I try reformatting it with FAT32 using 8.1, which I didn't think was possible. I could indeed convert it to NTFS, but I'm a bit puzzled why I would have to, as I would have thought that 8.1 if it supported FAT32 at all, would be happy even with a large partition.

Thanks guys! A good idea formatting the drive in 8.1, but can you do that? In XP you can't format any drive over 32 GB using FAT32, so I would be surprised if 8.1 could do it. I had to use Windows 98SE to format my 1TB FAT32 drive. I think you might be able to do it with format.exe, but I've never tried that.

Anyone?

Can anyone tell me whether Windows 8/8.1 has a history of not playing nicely with large FAT32 formatted drives? I have a recurring problem, which while it doesn't happen very often, is very annoying and worrying when it does. As you can see from my signature, I have a mult-boot machine. My main Archive drive is a 1TB SATA drive, connected to the motherboard via a SATA add-in card. All my videos, pictures, and documents are on it, but no system files. Although I have the NTFS driver installed on Windows 98, so I can access NTFS drives, I've preferred to keep the Archive drive as FAT32, along with the Windows 98 (of course) and Windows XP system drives. The problem I'm having is that sometimes when I manipulate files on the Archive drive when booted into Windows 8.1, the drive file system gets left in a corrupted state, which I usually don't discover until I boot back into Windows XP, which is still my normal OS. Today was a case in point. I went to 8.1 to do some video editing, which was both reading from the Archive drive and writing the exported file to it. When I had finished exporting, I deleted the source file from the drive, but of course left the new edited file there. On going back to Windows XP, I tried to open the exported file, and got a message that the file system was corrupted and to run Chkdsk. This I did, and it ended up having to repair several files, which it saved in the usual FOUND.000 folder (why those folders have to hidden is quite beyond me BTW!) The original saved video file had completely gone of course, but fortunately it turned out to be one of the files saved under another name by Chkdsk. The other files it reported as damaged were two other video files which I hadn't touched when I went into 8.1. One of them was apparently OK, but the other one, despite having the right name and thumbnail, when played turned out to be a duplicate of the first one! Fortunately the drive was all backed up so I could restore them, but how on earth can this happen?! This has happened several times before, and I can find no reason for it. On at least a couple of occasions I have lost files that were then completely unrecoverable with Chkdsk. One of the symptoms I've seen several times is that I delete files on the drive in Windows 8.1, but then when I go back to XP, Explorer shows them as being still there, although usually corrupted and unusable and Chkdsk has to be run to repair the file system. All very strange! Any advice welcome. Cheers, Dave.

Oh dear, it sounds like your Windows services are in a bit of a mess! Have a search to see if there's any way of restoring and resetting them, short of doing a repair install. You may have to do that though.

Well I'm glad it was that! Looking at the contents of "avast! Emergency Update.job", it looks as if just runs the file "AvastEmUpdate.exe". Maybe try setting up your own task to do the same thing with the same parameters and see if that causes the same problem.

It may be one of the tasks you've got scheduled that is causing the problem. To check that try moving all the files temporarily out of the C:\Windows\Tasks folder, including the hidden sa.dat file. Does the service run then? If it makes no difference just put the files back and nothing should have been lost. To properly access all the files in the Tasks folder you will have to use the Recovery Console, or some other file manager than Explorer, as it is a "special" folder. If you can't do that, remove its attributes and you should then be able to access it like a normal folder.

I've just checked, and everything seems to be OK with the Task Scheduler here.

Did you mean SP3 or SP4? I assume this is the same machine that you had the Print Spooler problem with? Did you mean RPC, not RCP? RPC is the Remote Procedure Call service. Again check in your Services list that it's present and running (again it should be set to Automatic).

Yes, the plural issue is extremely confusing! Do you say something is "in quotation markS" because there's two marks, at the beginning and at the end of the quotation, or because each mark is a double mark (two flipped over (inverted) commas side by side)?! The joys of the English language........

To me, as someone British, <"> is an inverted comma, or quotation mark (normally plural as in prose there's always two of them of course, not just because it's a double mark), and <'> is an apostrophe! I only use <'> as a quotation mark in computer file names (because you can't use <">) and where there is a quote within a quote.

I've just updated the dlls to version 13, and there seems to be no problems. Thanks @jumper!

Is the Print Spooler service running? If not, what happens when you try to start it? It should be in Automatic mode and be running all the time.

Thanks! I saw that update on Windows 7 and 8.1 machines, and was about to go a look for the standalone version to update it on XP. You saved me the trouble!

Hi @xper, did you get anywhere with this, nothing has changed?!

I don't use Firefox as my primary browser, I keep it along with several others to test the websites that I maintain. As such, I actually only use it quite rarely, although I do like to keep it up to date, but I can't say that I've noticed any problems with it up until now.

OK, I found the culprit! I checked in Windows Safe Mode, and Firefox 47 ran fine. To cut a long story short, Firefox is being stopped from running by my online banking protection software, Trusteer Rapport (now part of IBM). If I disable it Firefox 47 runs fine. Firefox 46 runs fine even with it enabled, but not 47. I guess it's a problem with its browser integration, which appears as an icon by the address bar, although unlike in some other browsers it doesn't appear as a listed extension. There's no point in reporting this to Trusteer, as they dropped support for XP some months ago, and they won't want to know! I will report it on the Mozilla forums though and see what they say. So, not a Windows XP problem at all. Please feel free to move this thread elsewhere! Cheers, Dave.