Windows OS

When installing System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM aka SMS v4), it is not always possible to give internet access to the server involved. I like to have everything I need beforehand whenever doing an install.

When SCCM setup launches, it tries to download the ConfigMgr.Manifest.cab from here. Overall it is best to allow SCCM to grab all the files it needs automatically because the ConfigMgr.Manifest.xml file inside the ConfigMgr.Manifest.cab file can be updated by Microsoft to point to new locations when these files are updated or moved.

With that said, here are the links contained in ConfigMgr.Manifest.XML as of 12-15-07 for the RTM release of SCCM 2007, broken into groups:

Microsoft Remote Differential Compression Library
(x86, x64, ia64)

Windows Update Agent
(x86, x64, ia64)

WMI
(x86, x64, ia64)

BITS
Windows 2000 - KB 842773
(ARA, CHS, CHT, CSY, DAN, DEU, ELL, ENU, ESN, FIN, FRA, HEB, HUN, ITA, JPN, KOR, NLD, NOR, PLK, PTB, PTG, RUS, SVE, TRK)

Windows 2003 - KB 923845
x86: (CHS, CHT, CSY, DEU, ENU, ESN, FRA, HUN, ITA, JPN, KOR, NLD, PLK, PTB, PTG, RUS, SVE, TRK)
x64: (CHS, CHT, DEU, ENU, ESN, FRA, ITA, JPN, KOR, PTB, RUS)
ia64: (DEU, ENU, FRA, JPN)

Windows XP - KB 923845
x86: (ARA, CHS, CHT, CSY, DAN, DEU, ELL, ENU, ESN, FIN, FRA, HEB, HUN, ITA, JPN, KOR, NLD, NOR, PLK, PTB, PTG, RUS, SVE, TRK)

Save all of those files into a directory, and simply point SCCM to that directory for the updates instead of attempting to download them all.

If you are looking for a text file that just has all of the HTTP links inside for use with a downloader program, you can right click and 'Save as' the text file here.

I've been doing more BDD/Microsoft Deployment work lately with various DDPS engagements and there are two fairly well known bugs in the current Microsoft Deployment toolkit that are easily fixed, but becomes tedious to fix on every install.

Rather than editing three scripts every time I install Microsoft Deployment, I've created this ZIP file that you can extract into "C:\Program Files" or wherever you have installed the Microsoft Deployment package. You should be asked to overwrite three files when extracting, and you should say "Yes". The original files are renamed with ".orig" at the end if you want to compare the before and after.

If you are not asked to overwrite files, you are probably extracting the ZIP file into the wrong location.

Update - 12-17-2007: I've updated the ZIP file to include the third fix mentioned here.

First off, this product has one of the longest names of any Live product, if not the longest name: Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare but has one of the shortest website addresses: http://fss.live.com

With that said, it is actually a really nice program but recently I have witnessed crash problems with Explorer.exe under Windows XP or Vista. I haven't had a chance to attach windbg.exe to an ailing install. I have however posted "Me too" posts to the team's blog and Connect site for this issue.

I originally had run into this issue with one of my XP SP3 beta VMs and at the time wrote it off as a fluke of the VM because it has had so many things installed and uninstalled from it in the past year. Once you uninstall Family Safety, Explorer.exe no longer crashes. Install Family Safety again, and the crashes return.

I was reminded of this problem when my boss ran into the same issue on his home machine recently. I suspect only the very latest version has the crashing problem, but I no longer have copies of the earlier builds.

To get to the point of this post, please post a comment here if you are experiencing crashing problems under XP or Vista with FSS installed. I'm trying to gather a pool of data to send over to the product team. I'm hoping it is a quick and easy fix.

Update: There are a few other people reporting the same problem here on the FSS team's blog. Please let them know too!

Update 2: Thanks to the comment left here by Luc - the update/fix for this is located here!