Dave-H

Strange that they don't appear in your Windows Update history. If you look in your Windows System Event Log however, they should be listed there with the source "NtServicePack".

Thanks den, yes I said earlier that I was a bit suspicious of the .NET optimisation service, which would almost certainly have caused the disk activity and the sluggish startup with the firewall error. I've seen that happen before after .NET updates. submix8c said he always disables it after any updates, but I guess it's there for a reason, and its impact on the system is only temporary. Just on this occasion, it may have generated the first crash, which may in turn have caused the second. Chkdsk ran after both crashes as you would expect, and although it didn't record fixing anything apart from the usual few truncated and cross-linked files that you always get after a stop error, it may have sorted it out. Still keeping my fingers crossed! I have updated Symevent BTW. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks guys! Touch wood, the machine seems to be running fine again now. I will certainly do the memory test if I get any more problems, but I would be very surprised indeed if it was failing RAM that caused the issue. It would be an amazing coincidence if it happened at the exact time that I installed those patches! It is odd that the patches all appeared to install with no errors, and then a sudden spontaneous BSOD occurred quite a while later after a successful reboot. I wasn't even actually using the machine when the first stop error happened, although there had been a lot of disk activity up to the point at which it crashed. I didn't see what the machine was doing when the second stop error occurred as I wasn't with it when it happened.

Thanks harkaz! I'm not sure how many people do have Norton/Symantec system utility software installed nowadays, but Norton Anti-Virus is certainly still quite commonly used. If you think there is a conflict here, and it can be fixed, that's great. Thank you very much indeed for all you're doing to keep Windows XP safe and alive! Cheers, Dave.

Hmm, sounds like these updates would be more safely installed in Safe Mode! Will they install in Safe Mode, I've never tried? I know the .NET updates need the Windows Installer, which I think won't work in Safe Mode, but how about the others?

Thanks! My version of SYMEVENT is 12.5.4.2, and the version on the FTP site is 12.8.6.38. I will update it. Even if it didn't cause the problem, and I've no reason to think that it has ever caused a similar issue before, it's always worth having the latest version. Cheers, Dave.

Well I do have Norton Utilities installed on the system (Norton Utilities 2002 in fact, the last one before you had to buy the whole suite including the AV!) so that explains the presence of symevent.sys. I also have Norton Crashguard and Norton CleanSweep. I know many people have no time for these programs, but they have worked well for me over the years. I've checked my BlueScreenView history (a great program BTW, which I've had installed for years!) and there are no previous incidents caused by symevent.sys recorded, but there are four stop errors recording symmonnt.sys as the cause. The last two were back in January of this year, the other two back in July 2012. It could be that there was some interaction which went on here which caused the system to fall over, but it's never done that after a Windows Update session before.

OK, here they are! I've given them a dummy .txt extension so the forum will let me upload them. I hope they give some clue as to what happened! Cheers, Dave. Mini051614-01.dmp.txt Mini051614-02.dmp.txt

Thanks, I think I will be a bit more wary next month! Touching wood, the machine seems to be stable again now. Whatever caused the BSODs seems to have cleared itself. I'm wondering if it was the .NET optimisation service, that runs after any .NET updates, that caused the crashes. It seems to have done its job now, and isn't running any more. The only other symptom I was getting was that the startup seemed to be slow (after the desktop loaded) and I was getting pop-up error messages that the Firewall wasn't running. This cleared eventually, and the startup now seems to be normal again. I've had this before after updates, so it may or may not be relevant.

I installed five of harkaz's modified updates yesterday. KB2953522 (IE8), KB2932079 (.NET 2.0), KB2931365 (.NET 4.0), KB2931352 (.NET security update), and KB2926765 (XP security update). All seemed well, but a while after the updates were installed, the machine suddenly blue screened. The stop error was 0x0000004E, PFN_LIST_CORRUPT, apparently thrown by ntoskrnl.exe. On restart, the machine seemed OK again. However this morning, after booting up and leaving it for a while, I found it with another BSOD. This time the stop error 0x00000044, MULTIPLE_IRP_COMPLETE_REQUESTS. Any ideas? I am a bit suspicious of KB2931352, as that seemed to replace a lot of .NET files, including some that were from ten years ago!

I must say I was surprised to find the Malicious Software Removal Tool being offered to me by Windows Update this morning! I wonder too if that will be an ongoing thing. I suppose it depends on how different the tool is on later versions of Windows. If it's the same for all Windows versions I can see no reason not to carry on offering it to XP users, if it isn't I suspect this will quickly stop as they're not going to carry on producing a special version just for XP.

Exactly the same thing happened on my machine with the root certificates apparently rolling back to an older version. Puzzled me too, glad I wasn't the only one! Presumably root certificate updates have now ended for XP along with everything else, but what about the updates that the OS does regularly automatically, which seem to happen regardless of whether automatic updating is enabled in Windows Update? I mean the "crypt32" entries that appear in the Windows Application log - "Successful auto update retrieval of third-party root list sequence number from: <http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootseq.txt>" and "Successful auto update retrieval of third-party root list cab from: <http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootstl.cab>" Will they now end as well, and will the OS constantly throw error messages into the log because it can't find the update?

Thanks!

Were the patches that were rolled out by Microsoft this week the last ones for Windows XP, or will there actually be another set on April 8th, which is the second Tuesday of the month?

Really pleased to see this, now I can keep my Windows XP installation alive as I have my Windows 98SE installation thanks to the great experts here! I really hope that this will be an ongoing project where at least some post XP EOS hotfixes from later versions of Windows can be integrated into XP installations.

I had an update on my Technet forum thread posted by Bruno at MS this morning, and he says someone at MS has checked and the links are working. I've just checked, and now they are! The thread is here. They seem to be saying that they should always have been working and it was probably a temporary fault, but if it was it lasted for many many weeks! I would like to think that they've seen they were wrong and have just quietly updated them, which is a good result if it's true! Cheers, Dave.

@GrofLuigi Thanks very much for that, at least it will be a useful fall-back to make the links meaningful again if MS don't get their own links working again in XP! BTW I tried the equivalent links on a friend's Windows 7 machine, and they do work there, going to the newly formatted pages on Technet. @jaclaz Yes, some of the suggestions were next to useless, but that always seems to be the case with generic help files, wherever they're from.

Well sometimes they did indeed just go to a page which said that no further information was available, but they did often take you to a page which explained what the error message was about and suggest solutions. Obviously a web search on the error would do the job just as well, maybe better, but I still think that this facility should work if it's still being offered to the user, at least until all the relevant information about XP is removed from Microsoft's servers, which I hope won't happen for many years yet!

Got a reply today from the thread here which seems to indicate that the issue has been escalated. I'm not holding my breath of course, but good to see that it is being followed up.

Hi guys! I've posted about this problem here on the Technet forums. I did get a reply that sent me to here, where someone else had reported pretty much the same issue. I posted there as well, but the last activity in that thread was back in September last year, so I'm not holding out much hope of a response! As I said in both posts, I can't see any reason to suddenly withdraw all this information, and if it still there but the links don't work because it's moved, surely this should be corrected, either at Microsoft's end, or by publicising a registry edit to correct it manually on affected systems.

Well it has been like this for several weeks now, it hasn't only just happened, so I was surprised to find no mention of it here or on any other forums when I did a search, even the Microsoft help forums seem to have nothing about it. Maybe I should ask them, although from what I've seen of them the MS help forums seem to be very unhelpful, usually the MS people seem to just post links to other threads or possible solutions, the links don't resolve things, the OP then comes back and says that, and there's then no further response!

Thanks, not just me then! That's a bit of a relief, as at least I now know it's not just my systems. MS have obviously changed something that has made this non-functional after over ten years, why I cannot imagine. I'm just surprised that there seems to be no comment about this anywhere!

Come on guys, 62 views and not a single reply?! All I'm asking is if others are seeing the same problem!

Hi guys! I have two machines with XP SP3 on them, and they are both showing this problem. If I open an event in any of the Event Logs, and click on the "For more information, see Help and Support Center at...." link, I no longer get any information as I've always done before. I just get a "page not found" message, which then re-directs to Bing, where the offered links usually don't work either! This has been happening for a few weeks now. I've searched and can find no reference to this anywhere, so is it happening for everyone on XP? Is this something to do with end of support, which I would have thought unlikely, but was my first thought of course?! I have Windows 8.1 on a machine as well, and I know that MS didn't bother to make the Event Log help links work on that before it was released, and they never did on Windows 8 either, which i think is pretty outrageous for an OS that's now been out more than a year, but I've not read anything to the effect that they've now removed the facility on XP as well. So, is it just me, or is everyone seeing this? Cheers, Dave.

Thanks again guys, and sorry for the delay in replying. As I said in my last post, my most recent tests were much more encouraging, and the drive seems to be working OK now with the USB interface under 98 without files suddenly vanishing after they've supposedly been written to the drive! I have downloaded and installed the SysInternals "sync" utility, and it seems to work fine. Whether it makes any difference I can't really determine until I next have a problem with the drive, but I mainly use it on XP anyway as it can then use the much faster eSATA interface.