I am experiencing a few seemingly unrelated by odd things with my XP MC SP2 PC (It is a newish HP Media Centre PC with Dual Core, 2gb mem, 700gb storage).

The problems in no specific order are: -

My wireless connection (Liteon internal card) freezes the connection after an unspecified period of time (usually when the PC is being woken up after sleeping) - when it does this the network name has been corrupted by having a wingding type square at each of the name!

Sometimes WZC controls the wireless network list and sometime it does not!

My fonts have changed on the desktop

Windows Update (which is automatic) keeps telling me there are update and when I check Install it comes back to tell me that all the items have NOT been installed (this list is long!)

When I go to manually do Windows Update it takes forever checking the system and nothing happens

Norton keeps giving me a red alert status around Windows Update not being automatic


Thats about it that I have spotted. This 'seemed' to start happening when I installed Skype a few weeks ago - although that maybe coincidence.

When I restart it all seems fine for a while. There seem to be no other critical problems.

Any suggestions as to what to do - I don't fancy a full system rebuild - anyway I do not have the XP MC OEM install disk. I know the cause could be a million things - however someone may have had a similar experience.

TIA,

Rannoch

 

Could be the svchosts.exe bug I recently had. Worth going to the MS support site and looking it up on their knowledgebase. This is an issue going around in relation to Windows Updates taking a long time. I take it you have checked 'Task Manager' when these things happen?
Also have you downloaded and installed the latest drivers for your network card?

 

I think it is fixed now - fingers crossed. It is exactly as you said.

I tried to have a go at fixing it again and this time the Windows Installer actually crashed so I sent the Error Report and got a redirect as you comment on above.

I followed the instructions - my backlog of Windows Updates resolved, my sound card drivers reappeared, my wireless looks like it working properly!

Not sure how the problem could have caused all this - however a bunch of half implemented Windows updates may be partly to blame.

 

A whole day of working correctly.

I am really annoyed with Microsoft now as I have spent hours over the last three weeks trying to solve a problem they have caused via automatic updates