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I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 17 years 4 months 26 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

What an aggravating two days this has been for many people, thanks to a Microsoft Update. I got phone calls or e-mails from several different people about the same issues I had, due to yesterday morning’s update.

Here’s a “workaround” for your problem, if it was caused by Windows Updates this Wednesday, June 13th, 2007

Start in Safe Mode or Safe Mode with networking

Do this by repeatedly tapping the F5 key at the top of my keyboard. This must be done fairly rapidly at the first white text appearing on the monitor at boot up.

This brings up a menu, where you should chooose “safe mode with networking” by moving the arrow keys on your keyboard and pressing enter for that selection.

Upon boot up, there is a Windows message notifying that diagnostic mode, then hit okay.

Go to Start button – All programs – Accessories – System tools – system restore – and complete the process choosing a date before Wednesday’s Windows update

Complete the restore process and reboot –

Then Turn Off Windows Updates

Right-click on my computer and go to properties

Choose the automatic updates tab, and turn automatic updates off and hit apply.

If you lost any sound or other devices TOO (like I did), here is how to fix that –

Right-click on my computer and go to properties

Go to the hardware tab, and hit the button for Device manager

Use the arrow keys to go down to “sound video and game controllers” and expand to see all devices

Right-click on any devices listed and choose “uninstall” for all that are available.

Go to the “action” menu item, and choose “scan for hardware changes”

That’s it – but beware, because now you have a system that is not being updated with Microsoft’s latest patches. What are we supposed to do now, Microsoft.

Yesterday morning, Wednesday, I woke up to my computer rebooted by Microsoft for the automatic windows updates.

Every time an update is so critical that Microsoft forces a reboot, we all lose every window we had open, and anything in mid-project has to be remembered, and hopefully, everything was saved.

After getting over that frustration, I signed in with my password, where Windows proceeded to get to the desktop, then began starting all my programs, my backup service,my chat, my antivirus, and miscellaneous programs that I have running at all times.

About three quarters of the way through the process the computer rebooted. This went on for four times in a row, before I attempted to boot in safe mode, which was successful.

By this time I’m 45 minutes behind checking my e-mail etc. so I worked my way through the morning e-mail and tasks in safe mode before having to leave for an appointment at 8am.

When I got back, I cited to try again, which was unsuccessful, so I get a Microsoft system restore back to the previous day, and all was well. Obviously, something had gone wrong in the Windows update process, so by going back to the way things were Monday, everything was fine.

Unfortunately, I forgot to turn off automatic updates, so I had to go through the process again this morning! Aggghh –

After getting things back to normal I found that my sound drivers were corrupted somehow, so I could not use my headset and microphone. Looking in the device manager, showed no problems, but I no longer had a microphone or any input ability showing in my Windows volume controls.

Using system restore to go back to previous states did no good either, and in the end, the solution was to manually remove all of my sound drivers (not the codecs) from the device manager, then search for new hardware, then all was founded back to normal.

Thank you again to Microsoft for wasting nearly 2 hours of my time, at inopportune moments over the past two days. Now I’m running an unpatched system, and don’t have time to look around your troubleshooting area for your solution.
So now I’m running an unpatched version of Windows XP…

As the average consumer, am I supposed to drive my computer somewhere or pay someone to come to the office to deal with this?

Since I’m a computer tech (in a previous life) am I supposed to break down and finally install Windows Vista, which has been sitting on my shop bench since January?

The second option makes the most sense because I’m sure that Microsoft has gotten it right this time, with Windows Vista, right? 😉

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