Dave-H

Well I tried spoofing as IE10 and IE11, and it made no difference at all, things were exactly the same as when it's spoofed as IE9. All the Microsoft support pages are still just plain white pages with apparently no content, although if you look at their source, everything appears to be there, it's just not being displayed! I compared the registry entries on Windows 8.1/IE11, and most of the ones that are on XP, although they are all present, seem to be blank on 8.1. I guess that's all that can be done.

I'm now trying to see if I can get Flash 23 to work in Google Chrome. My PepperFlash files are actually in D:\Users\Dave\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\PepperFlash\22.0.0.209 (my Windows XP installation is on drive D: not C:). I tried substituting the Flash 22 files for the Flash 23 versions, but Chrome still says it's using Flash 22 unless I change the folder name from "22.0.0.209" to "23.0.0.185", which is bizarre! Even when it then correctly recognises it as being Flash 23, it still doesn't work. It either says the Flash Player isn't installed on some sites, or say it can't load the plugin on others. Very odd!

Thanks Den, now I remember going through exactly this when I was having the same problem with IE6 on Windows 98 earlier in the year! The reg update has got rid of the update nag as you say, but all the Microsoft Support pages are now just being displayed as plain white blank pages with no content. Is that what you would expect? The Windows Help and Support Center is still saying it can't dispaly a lot of pages too. I don't think IE9 is still supported either, so can IE8 be made to look like the current version, IE11, or is that not possible?

The main reason I abandoned it was that it crashed constantly on YouTube, and when playing Facebook videos. As long as you just let the video play in real time it was fine, but as soon as you tried to scrub the video using the seek bar, or jump to a later point, the plugin immediately crashed all the time, on Opera and Slimjet. I have a script running in Tampermonkey on Slimjet to force YouTube to use the Flash Player instead of the HTML5 Player, as it serves many videos at only 360p otherwise because of the lack of codecs in Windows XP, and Opera and Slimjet both rely on the OS to provide them. Google Chrome does not have this problem as it includes the codecs. I will give it another try, but I had no luck resolving this before.

I'm now seeing sites completely blocked using IE8, including all the Microsoft support pages which now just say that I must upgrade my browser, with no way offered to still access the pages. Also the Windows Help and Support Center does not now show a very large number of pages, just saying "this page cannot be displayed". Presumably this is because it is simply a skin of IE8. I assume this is because of outdated security protocols in IE8. Obviously I can use other browsers on the pages that no longer work, but I just wondered if there was any fix or workaround for this, or is it something that now has to be just accepted?

The first version of the PPAPI Flash 23 plugin didn't work at all for me, as it didn't for anyone by all accounts! I read this was fixed in 23.0.0.185, but when I installed it, although the plugin would now load, unlike its predecessor, it was really unstable, crashing all the time both in Opera 26 and Slimjet 10. I didn't try it in Google Chrome 49, as although I have it installed I don't actually use it. I've gone back to 22.0.0.209 which works fine.

Another aside as I don't think it's been mentioned, there is now yet another version of Silverlight, very quickly after the last one! The new version is 5.1.50901.0.

Yes, I saw that when I was investigating the KB971891 entry that had appeared in Add/Remove programs after KB3188734 was installed. Since I uninstalled that update for the reasons above that entry has gone. The equivalent KB3189017 entry, which is KB960043, does not seem to appear in the list, presumably as it's marked in the registry as being un-uninstallable. I'm surprised that the option was there to uninstall KB971891 as the article warns you not to!

Yes, you do. I decided to remove KB3188734 as it was causing the spurious pushing of KB2756918, which even if you hide it, nags you every time you run Windows Update because you've hidden an important update. I uninstalled KB3188734, and was then told I had to install KB3142046 as well as KB2756918. The former installed OK, but the latter just kept failing with error 0x643, which appears to indicate a corrupted .NET installation. I used the .NET repair tool, no difference. I tried System Restore, which has never worked on this particular system, and didn't this time either, all restore points go through the motions and then it says "your system could not be restored" with no reason given. As I've been through the incredibly lengthy and tedious process of .NET repairing before, which amounts to completely uninstalling and reinstalling all the versions, I took a chance and simply restored the registry to a point before the two updates were applied. Fortunately this removed the prompts from Windows Update, and I then simply reinstalled KB3189017 and all seems well. I think I'll leave KB3188734 off the system unless or until the spurious update prompt can be resolved.

I installed both .NET updates successfully, the one for .NET 4.0 took an extremely long time to install, in fact it sat there for nearly ten minutes after apparently successfully verifying its files, before it continued and installed. I was then prompted to install KB2756918 too for .NET 3.0, which as stated is an old XP update from several years ago. I ran my file checker, and the new updates had replaced many files with newer versions. Just as a test I installed KB2756918 and ran the file checker again. Apparently no files had been replaced. Unfortunately, KB2756918 seems to be one of those annoying updates that you can install apparently successfully over and over until you're blue in the face, but the system will always then still tell you that you need to install it! I've now hidden it as @dencorso suggested. I guess the updated files from the new .NET 3.0 update may not be being seen as the latest files by the system, perhaps because KB2756918 is an XP update, not a WEPOS update, so it thinks it needs to be installed.

I got them from the Microsoft Update Catalogue. Just search for the Knowledge Base numbers, and it should go straight to them. Note that there are 32 bit and 64 bit versions of both of them. HTH.

Well they certainly weren't offered by Microsoft Update, at least not to me!

All OK here too, although both of my XP installations seemed to take much longer than usual to do the custom updates scan on Microsoft Update. Was that the same for everyone? It is good that the installation process is now very much quicker without the Malicious Software Removal Tool!

Done. Thanks!

My Dropbox has now updated itself to version 10.4.25 and still seems to be working OK. It did install a service, DbxSvc.exe, which was throwing up error messages in my Windows System Event Log - "The DbxSvc service failed to start due to the following error: DbxSvc is not a valid Win32 application." A quick registry edit disabled it OK and it doesn't seem to have caused any problems doing that. It appears to be a service for Windows 7 (Win 7 DDK driver).

I only just got offered KB3182203 today. Now I know what you're talking about! I live in London, and it's actually dark at 4 pm in the middle of winter. We do keep the pubs open until 11 pm!

Well that didn't take too long to fix! I now have version 9.4.49 running quite happily on XP, and the only thing you have to do to make it communicate with the Dropbox servers is run the executable in compatibility mode for Windows 2000! So, it looks as if it looks specifically for XP and blocks it, but an even older OS is perfectly acceptable! Go figure! I found that with a bit of research of course, I didn't find the answer all by myself! It won't let you in with an old version of the client, so what I had to do was uninstall my version 2.10.52.0, and then find a copy of 3.18.1, which may well be the last that will install on XP from my researches. It installed fine, but still wouldn't let me in because it still said it was an old version, but then, lo and behold, it updated itself to 9.4.49 (the current version) and just carried on working. So, normal Dropbox service resumed, at least for the moment! As always, there's no way of knowing how long this will last for, but I'm very pleased that it's OK again for the moment!

Thanks, yes I was aware of that. As far as I'm concerned that makes the Dropbox app's refusal to connect on an XP system even more of a nonsense!

A bit late in the day, but I've only just spotted this thread! I recently manually updated Adobe Reader to 11.0.17 (it doesn't do it automatically any more of course) and had exactly the same experience! I immediately thought, "oh dear, that's the end of that, back to 11.0.16 again", but as you say after one error message it's now running fine. Bizarre!

I've got version 2.10.52.0 of the Dropbox program installed. I haven't used it for ages, although I do have some files stored there. I just tried it, and was prompted to log in, and was then just told "your computer is not longer supported". I guess if I still want to use Dropbox I can just install the latest version on the Windows 8.1 side of my machine, but it would be interesting to know if this seemingly arbitrary block on XP machines can be worked around.

My Opera 36 didn't update automatically, but it did update when I did a manual check by going to the "About Opera" page in the menu. If that doesn't work for you, the latest version can be downloaded here. You need the file whose name ends with "setup.exe".

Unfortunately, modified system files are one thing that they are designed to check, as that could be a symptom of a virus attack of course. Apart for manually white-listing the files in the AV software, I suspect that there is no ideal solution to this, the AV software is only doing its job!

If you're absolutely sure that it's a false positive, I suspect it's being flagged simply because the file has been modified. I've made really simple modifications to files with Resource Hacker, and my AV (Trend Internet Security) has started flagging them as suspicious files. I'm not sure what you can do about that.

LOL!