The Blog Thing

After upgrading my system to a new mainboard, Windows XP wouldn’t start anymore. It would briefly show the XP logo, change to black and reboot over and over.
This is nothing to be concerned about and is easily fixed using your Windows XP CD. Just start the system with the CD, and choose to repair your existing installation. Mind you, that is not the repair console, it’s the option on the next screen.

After the repair, Windows will boot again and you can install drivers for your new mainboard, graphics card, etc. Most of your applications will still work fine, except for some that use specific hardware (such as burner programs, CD emulators like Daemon Tools, UltraISO, etc).

The problem I had on two computers, is that Windows Automatic Updates (WAU) wouldn’t work anymore. Manually or fully automatic, it will tell you that there are lots (80+ in my case) of updates, will download them, and will fail to install any and all. The problem reported is something very general, like “Problem: A problem on your computer is preventing updates from being downloaded or installed” or something along those lines.

What has happened, it that for some reason some components (DLL’s) of WAU aren’t “registered” anymore. To fix this, copy the text below, do a “Start -> Run” and type “cmd” and Enter, and paste the text into the cmd text box that should appear. For every line a window will pop up, saying the the DLL was registered. Restart your computer and WAU should work fine.
The lines below assume that Windows XP is installed in C:\WINDOWS. If yours is in C:\WINNT or any other, change the lines accordingly.

regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuweb.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups2.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wups.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wucltui.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuaueng.dll
regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\wuapi.dll