XP

Most of the time, Windows 2003 and XP behave correctly when communicating with a Windows 2008 Read Only Domain Controller. RODCs are extremely handy for branch offices, especially when combined with Bitlocker, for extra security for remote locations.

This update, KB 944043 helps work around some of the known issues that 2003 and XP do not know how to handle out of the box, because RODCs did not exist when they were originally programmed.

In general, you'll want to deploy this on your network before you deploy any RODCs to prevent any of these potential "gotchas". So far, it has been my experience that "everything just works" with RODCs without these updates, but I don't have some of the exotic setups that these known issues arise from.

Go here for the fix if you are experiencing this issue.

I have experienced this problem on my little Thinkpad 240 laptop that I use as a poor man's EVDO router. Believe it or not, it makes for an extremely portable "Internet hot-spot on the go".

Sometimes when the Novatel NDIS adapter 'falls asleep' on the receive side, I have to reset the connection. This only happens rarely, but before this fix was installed, DNS resolution of the ICS clients would fail unless I hard-coded external DNS servers on the client systems.

Of course, the hard drive on the Thinkpad has an expired warranty and is an IBM DeathStar with bad sectors, so it is only a matter of time I have a massive hard drive failure. I have a system image backup for when that day comes. I've been saying that for the past 2 years.

Now that I've mentioned it on here, I am sure it will fail within a week.

When that day comes, I can roll out a beta of the Forefront Threat Management Gateway for our house.

Windows Script 5.7 comes with XP SP3, so if you are running XP SP3, Vista, or Server 2008, you already have WScript 5.7.

This is a relatively small upgrade compared to other releases but it does come with some performance improvements and bug fixes which are noted here.

If you want to download Windows Script 5.7 for these older operating systems, go here.

If you want more in depth information about this release, check out the KB article here.

If you are curious what fixes made it into XP SP3, take a look at KB article 946480.

Go here to read about the issue and update your MDAC on XP SP2, XP SP3, Vista RTM, Vista SP1, and Server 2008 to this latest revision to prevent potential data loss in certain (rare) cases.

This is the bug that caused the delay with XP SP3 due to problems with CRM.

I was thinking about this today because typically intelppm.sys does not change very often. In the past year, Microsoft did update intelppm.sys for Penryn 45nm Deep Power Down support. I wonder if you loaded KB 940566 on an OEM XP SP2 build, if you would experience the same crash issue.

If you don't know what I am talking about, read here and here about the AMD CPU issues on some OEM XP builds that mistakenly include intelppm.sys in their deployment build.

Does it change anything overall? Not really, but I am always curious about stuff like this.

This seems to be the #1 issue seen in the field so far with XP SP3 and typically, unfortunately, relates to OEM XP installations that includes the Intel CPU driver on machines that are clearly AMD based. Previous to SP3, this would not cause problems. I will leave my rant about most OEM builds for a future date.

If you have an AMD based machine that seems to be rebooting continuously after installing XP SP3, and it is running an OEM XP install, please investigate KB 888372 for the fix.

Personally, although I know it isn't exactly the most elegant or supported method, I've simply deleted the Intelppm.sys from %windir%/system32/drivers on machines I know are AMD based, before installing SP3. You won't want to do this to Intel based machines because it will render them unbootable until you replace the Intelppm.sys file.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an updated hotfix that replaces Intelppm.sys from SP3 with a version that does not crash on AMD based systems. A few CPU calls is all that it takes to 'bail out' on an AMD system instead of toggling bits on the CPU that make it crash.

Update: Looks like I'm behind the times on reporting this one - as shown here by Bill Castner.

I was always curious what issue came up at the last minute that would cause the delay of XP SP3. I had wondered if they were pulling it due to aspects of the XP SP3 release still referring to itself as a beta in spots. I also had wondered if it was somehow related to the NTFS.sys/filter bug that affected Home Server and if it had become a blocking issue in the other operating systems.

Overall, it isn't a terribly interesting bug to me, but I don't deal with CRM a lot. I'm curious if it could affect other SQL/MDAC applications, but it sounds pretty isolated. If anyone bumps into a new issue, please leave a comment. If I am reading the article correctly, it looks like it might be isolated to the msadce.dll file shipped with XP SP3.

I am just happy overall that XP SP3 is finally out and I don't have to carry around a USB stick of hotfixes for people. I'm also curious to hear if you have any issues installing XP SP3 and I'll make sure your comments get to the Windows Client team in Redmond.