I was upgrading my Windows XP box to Service pack 2 and had to stop it in the middle becuase the rest of the folks on the network were complaining about bandwidth. I shut down the machine and when later I restarted and tried to upgrade again, I got an error. I now notice that there is a ton of network activity, most of it sends (about 10 to 1 sends vs receives), even though I am not in update.
Questions:
Is Windows Update just restarting from where it left off?
Is there any way to see what progress I am making?
I use my keychain drive to do SP2 update installs. There are a few sites on the web that offer the SP2 file as a standalone. Only take it from a trusted site. It is 76mb IIRC.
If you are of a nerdy nature, you can download a free network traffic analyzer from http://www.ethereal.com/ to get to the bottom of where those packets are going… and ultimately why if you can understand the results.
My wild but educated guess is that Windows Update is holding your feet to the fire with one of their ever present “authentication”/“legit license” routines that is being stymied somehow… perhaps your firewall, anti-virus, etc is being too aggressive. Said stymie is not accommodated at that part of the routine and your XP keeps sending out the required info but is not receiving the instructions to continue on to the next stage. Just a possibility. I never let any of the clownish security programs (Norton, Mcafee) run when installing SP2 or any of the major updates so I rarely run into such problems.