The appearance and disappearance of a Windows XP installation snafu indicates that Microsoft Corp. patched a critical vulnerability in XP’s still-unfinished Service Pack 3 (SP3) weeks before it fixed any other version of Windows. The glitch, which sent some PCs into an endless round of reboots, was strangely similar to one faced by Vista users in February.
Attackers have already tried to exploit that bug, which was patched last Tuesday — as it turned out, two weeks after the newest build of Windows XP SP3 was released with the flaw fixed.
According to reports from multiple users on a Microsoft support newsgroup, PCs began rebooting immediately after they had been updated to SP3. “I have just updated my pc from xp sp2 to sp3,” said a user identified as “yaojinglin” in a message to an SP3 support forum last Thursday. “The installation was successful, but when I reboot my pc after the installation finished, my pc started to reboot again and again.”
Nearly two months before, some Windows Vista users experienced similar endless rebooting after an update designed to prepare machines for the upcoming Service Pack 1 locked up PCs. It’s believed that the similarities are a coincidence.
Source: ComputerWorld