I returned home from work today to find that Chrystal’s laptop had got it’s knickers in a twist and it was stuck in an endless loop of trying to configure updates to Vista.  I looked into it and discovered that Microsoft has greatly expanded its repertoir of frustrating messages since Windows XP.

Basically it was giving a message about configuring updates, counting through percentages of three stages, and then restarting at stage three, whereupon it went into its startup recovery mode and then after saying it had fixed problems it rebooted and went back into the configuring updates message and so on and so on. Left to its own devices this would have gone on for ever.

I did some Googling and it sounded like this problem.   The solutions were not much help: we do not have an installation CD for Vista and going into ‘safe mode’ proved to be impossible.  Whether I chose safe mode or safe mode with command line it just went back into the familiar loop.

Extra marks to Microsoft for putting an active ‘cancel’ button on the system recovery screen.  When you click on it you get a pop-up window that says “this action cannot be cancelled”, leading to cries of WHY PUT THE BLOODY BUTTON THERE THEN?  Even choosing the option to go back to the last working configuration led to the same loop of doom.

In the end I did manage to get into the system recovery screen and rolled back to a recovery point a few days ago.  After that I was able to get in and look at the system updates, which didn’t help at all.  All the articles I found on the Internet and in Microsoft’s Knowledge Base mentioned a couple of updates that are prerequisites to having SP1 and said that the problem was caused by SP1 trying to install without those updates being available – but when I looked they were already loaded.

So all I know now is that the problem was not the one all the web resources say it is, and it could all happen again at any time if another update comes along.   Up until today I had been very impressed with Vista: I had tinkered with three computers with the OS on it and after getting used to it I was impressed… but it turns out to be a typical MS cock-up.  I should have known better and remembered that its always best to wait until you can install it with SP2.