Being wary of anything remotely looking like a gift from Microsoft, I never run automatic updates. I only do manual updates and look closely at what I am being offered before downloading. I decline the offer of anything I don't understand or don't see as necessary to improve my "user experience". If I cant research the anomalous item I leave it be and look at the forums to see what the "early adopters" are reporting.

I would really recommend not allowing Microsoft to just install updates when it "feels" like doing so. This would forestall experiencing issues like the continuous reboot cycle cited by JIK and other SP3 issues reported by other users. There is just something that just gets up my nose about Microsoft not giving me a choice about what software gets installed on my computer and when! While I'm on that theme, I wont even begin to talk about Office 2007 or Vista.

In this vein of caution, today I just bought a RAID disk array to back up my entire XP installation, before running the SP3 update. I run Trend Micro security and will use Acronis True- Image to do the back up before running the SP3 update. I can think of better things to do like playing my 1928 Vega banjo as opposed to spending inordinate amounts of time trying to troubleshoot yet another problematic Microsoft installation let alone doing another reintall!

Curiously enough, I have noticed that accessing the Windows update server has been intermittently flaky of late even before doing SP3. The symptoms have been IE trying to logon, getting the options for Express or Custom updates and then the browser hanging with the usual animation not running and the word "Done" in the bottom left hand corner of the browser. Restarting the browser sometimes helped but more usually a complete reboot and then going straight to the update site before running anything else after startup seems to get me in. I was hoping SP3 might fix that small annoyance.

The moral of the story is don't be an early adopter of any thing Microsoft and dont give them a blank check to install any kind of shite on your systems.

Cheers,

Andrez