Nice shot, Microsoft, right in the foot. Again.

Sure, I'll hand over my Windows XP when they pry it from my cold dead hard drive.

Alright...well, at least they had the guts to admit they did something wrong and try to remedy the situation as best as possible until they could get it completely fixed...they could have just left it...I mean, yea...could be worse.

@mgo...it's only a matter of time...

Ouch, I wonder if it took off Microsoft's Big Toe on this one -- But again, this isn't the first time it has happened, is it?

Does Microsoft employ quality assurance software testers who run test plans before an update is pushed? How does this get past testing?

This is feeling more and more like MS is just throwing stuff against the wall to see if it sticks. Paul Thurott once described Longhorn as "a train wreck", which he retracted upon later builds, but IMO this is an accurate description of MS' development process at this time.
What's the point of all the new, productivity-oriented software development releases they have (.Net), if MS themselves decide that snafus like these are a more attractive alternative to dogfooding their own framework and leading by example? Will it take an Xbox-like mea culpa to the tune of $1 billion to make apps/OS realize that at some point, their heads must roll when they botch the flagship over and over again?

This is what you get when a company has a split personality and has to resort to stopgap efforts to fill a technology deficit they can't seem to bring themselves to admit they have. The industry has to be the ones to tell themselves Microsoft doesn't have the goods.

Gee. Took long enough.

When they started gutting Longhorn in 2004 and when they had to delay Vista for the big "rewrite" fiasco of 2006, the industry should have shaken off the moneyed opiates and "incentives" journalists receive to puff the smoke up the blind customers' butts.

I still wonder what it's going to take for "journalists" to start asking the hard hitting questions of the Microsoft principals.

Can't think of any food ones? How about: "HEY BALLMER, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" Want one for Ozzie? "HEY OZZIE! WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO EARN YOUR PAY?"

Gee. Maybe I could be a journalist. Ya think?

Not to jump to MS defense all the time, but look at the hardware base out here. There are infinite possible hardware combinations, how could MS possibly test an update against EVERY possible combination? It's no wonder there are driver conflicts. Driver conflicts are this days equivelent of DLL Hell.

BTW...the pre-SP1 updates worked flawlessly on my T61 Thinkpad.

Emspilot:
If virtualization is done properly and that means granular virtualization you don't need to have specific drivers written for every piece of metal you install on a machine. The drivers should be virtual and not built on a specific code base.

THAT is what Microsoft was trying to do years ago and they failed to do it. The big question is where and how did they fail? How is it the biggest and richest and baddest failed to grasp the true nature of virtualization?

And I DO mean FAILED.

Just for comparison, I've done 5 Vista SP1 updates from the .iso image from TechNet and have had no failures. These systems were a combination of laptops and desktops from Dell, Sony and Lenovo.

Emspilot: Good point, except MS decides to redesign their driver architecture for almost every single release (this from the same company that won't rewrite their 10-year old shell because there's too much of an investment in the existing code). Stable drivers can be extremely difficult to write (esp kernel-mode), and it's that much more difficult when your coding against a constantly-changing spec.

Yes, writing stable software is hard work. If it was easy, little girls would do it. Ballmer has thousands of people on the payroll supposedly engaged in development activities for Vista. From the looks of things lately, the lower decks aren't happy with the officers or the direction of the vessel. Maybe those $60 stock options have some bearing on crew morale.

Joe the update wasn't exactly pulled. I spent an hour plus on the phone this morning with Microsoft support getting the KB937287 removed from my computer because of an error. Basically they had me restore my computer to a previous time, installed all the Microsoft updates I took in on the 13th again. Then Microsoft update showed the offending KB937287, which Microsoft update installed all by itself. The tech pointed out that the KB937287 update now has to be installed by itself, not like it was when I installed it on the 13th. Anyway everything seems to be working fine so far. take care

Sometimes it pays to be a procrastinator...it comes in handy when trying out new software. There always seem to be glitches that need to be fixed.

Looks like that new copy of XP Pro I just got on eBay for $130 is going to come in handy.

I applied Vista SP1 to my Acer C314XMi tabletpc, and my home built PC, both running Vista Ultimate without any problems.

I've been fortunate with Vista. I've not had any major issues, other than some DRM'd training videos that won't run on my laptop because of the video driver/hardware and Vista's built-in DRM. Acer has no plan for upgrading the video driver, so I run my training video in a W2K VM - works great!

Thank goodness.

What will this mean for Dimdows 7? After all, that's going to be built on the Vista foundation, isn't it? So if that foundation is shaky, won't that spell trouble for the new version?

Or they could go back to XP and start again, but given it took six years to get something useful out of that approach, won't that just lead to further delays?

Lawrence: It is built on Vista, but MS has been going through a major cleanup of the kernel, etc (it sounds like Sinofsky is putting Windows on an Intel-like tick-tock cycle to minimize Vista(or Prescott)-like disasters. Unfortunately, there's only so much cleanup Windows can endure - the "MinWin" kernel is supposedly around 25 MBs in size. I think the answer for them is to move to a clean-room OS (like Singularity), and have a hypervisor-based compatibility mode to keep the core OS more pure. That being said, with the exception of SQL Server, MS has been incredibly gun-shy when it comes to rewriting their products for the sake of cleanup (I personally *do* believe in rewriting, and I don't even have the kind of testing resources MS has)

Lawrence: It is built on Vista, but MS has been going through a major cleanup of the kernel, etc (it sounds like Sinofsky is putting Windows on an Intel-like tick-tock cycle to minimize Vista(or Prescott)-like disasters. Unfortunately, there's only so much cleanup Windows can endure - the "MinWin" kernel is supposedly around 25 MBs in size. I think the answer for them is to move to a clean-room OS (like Singularity), and have a hypervisor-based compatibility mode to keep the core OS more pure. That being said, with the exception of SQL Server, MS has been incredibly gun-shy when it comes to rewriting their products for the sake of cleanup (I personally *do* believe in rewriting, and I don't even have the kind of testing resources MS has)

Two months after the death loop update was "pulled," it arrived in my computer and promptly sent it into loop-land. Apparently, MS did not work out the bugs before resuming automatic updates with it. Apple store, here I come.

Jimbo.....same thing happened to my daughter's laptop the day they released the "fixed" version. Still trying to get booted up as it's an HP with no CD-ROM install.

Since most of my existing software won't work on Vista anyway, I'll be looking at to Apple for my next desktop.

Hm... Weird, I have no problems with that update, normally boots up, no random reboots. Works PERFECT!