If you could only choose 5 updates or less to slipstream into Windows XP, which would

they be if:

1) you only had sp1 installed

2) you only had sp2 installed

Due to Gates Law, my main interest is for sp1.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates'_Law

For SP2, integrate RyanVM's Post-SP2 UpdatePack. It has all updates published by Microsoft integrated into the install source and it doesn't take more space! Unfortunately, no such update pack exists for SP1.

EDIT: Forgot link: http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

EDIT2: Add-Ons are available for things like WMP11 and IE7 (as well as other things) to integrate. Take a look!

Edited March 16, 200719 yr by dougiefresh

I was mainly interested in finding out which updates you've experienced to be truly critical (note "truly", as in not what M$ deems critical).

If you have experienced problems with a fresh WinXP install, found out what the bug was, and went out looking for a fix that ended up being a specific patch from Microsoft, I would like to know what it was.

Personally, I have only experienced this with KB824146

Gates Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gates'_Law

Gates' Law is the observation that the speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months. This can be for a variety of reasons: "featuritis", "code cruft", programmer laziness, or a management turnover whose design philosophy does not coincide with the previous manager.

Gates' Law comes out of the frustration that many users feel around the tendency of commercial software to slow down with each successive incremental version so that buying new software upgrades sounds like a reasonable idea. This "slowing down" may or may not be intentional.

It is inversely related to Moore's Law, which tends to focus on the speed of microprocessors increasing. Software, run on microprocessors, does not increase in speed -- it only decreases in speed. It's a variant of Wirth's law that states that "Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.".

It is attributed to Bill Gates, but Gates himself did not say it. Rather, the term is attributed to Gates based on the noted tendency of Microsoft products to slow down with each successive feature -> OR PATCH <-.