XP SP2 issues

Friday, August 20, 2004

Misc.

I'm sure that 90% of people running SP2 will not have any problems, but we've already had a lot of issues.

First is the default IE security. My wife decided to upload photos to Ofoto on her machine (usually it's on mine), and for whatever reason, the browser would not allow her to install the ActiveX control under any circumstances. It didn't even prompt for it. She changed the settings to at least allow for the prompt. That's going to piss-off a lot of site publishers I'm sure.

She's also a big City of Heroes player, and since installing SP2, the game slowed to an unplayable state when things got busy. It wasn't the video driver (had the latest from Nvidia). We don't know if it was something else in the graphics or motherboard pipelines, or a network issue, but it sucked to epic proportions.

While checking to see what the pagefile settings were (which seem to be arbitrarily set to follow a range of a half-gig to a gig, same settings on my machine), I noticed the "Data Execution Prevention" tab. Never heard anything about that, but it's on, and you can't turn it off without modifying the boot.ini file (which also happens to be read-only). The theory is to apparently stop the execution of any program that tries to write to memory it shouldn't. I assume this is a catch-all for buffer overrun vulnerabilities. It's just weird that I've never heard anything about it. Regardless, turning it off had no effect, but I'm curious to know how it affects performance.

We ended up uninstalling SP2 on her machine. City of Heroes runs great again. They're going to be in a world of hurt as it rolls out.

I still have the issue with Avid Xpress. Avid, in a shocking move given their reluctance to do anything to maintain compatibility (they wouldn't support XP for ages), posted in their forum that they're working on "the few remaining issues."

10 Comments

I thought SP2 was supposed to allow 2 users to login simultaneously. I've looked high and low but I can't seem to find any options that enables that. Did they end up not going with it after all?

Kulin - Thursday, August 19, 2004 8:40:00 PM

Might be SP2 limiting the number of incomplete outbound connections. It will have a max of 10. Check your system event log.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/sp2netwk.mspx#XSLTsection127121120120

anon - Thursday, August 19, 2004 8:47:00 PM

Jeff, Data Execution Prevention is currently a SP2 + AMD64 feature, as it requires cpu support, Intel are adding it later in the year i believe.

Kulin, I think the 2 logins was mainly to boost smart screen sales, but as they've been shelved, i guess that got shelved too, shame cos i was looking forward to that feature too.

Daren - Friday, August 20, 2004 3:03:00 AM

Not true... I realize that the AMD's do this in hardware, but this is being plugged as a software version of that.

Jeff - Friday, August 20, 2004 3:05:00 AM

Its a software version that requires hardware support to work. This feature will not work (as far as everything I've heard) unless you have a processor and possibly mobo that supports this feature.

Kevin - Wednesday, August 25, 2004 9:19:00 PM

That's not correct. Read the help file.

Jeff - Wednesday, August 25, 2004 11:58:00 PM

Jeff is correct :)

DmmH - Friday, September 3, 2004 3:02:00 AM

Turn off SP2's firewall and all should be good

Eight - Friday, September 3, 2004 11:11:00 AM

Set vms := false and you'll be fine

cookie - Friday, September 10, 2004 1:43:00 PM

cookie, you must set oledvms := 0 too

jax - Friday, September 10, 2004 1:45:00 PM

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