As a mater of interest did you let it do the sp3 as an automatic update or did you down load the SP3 service pack and then install it, only most of the problems with it seem to come from the auto-update method rather than installing it from the downloaded version.
I did the latter - a manual Microsoft Update request to microsoft.com.
Here's another update on this sorry saga:
The Repair process worked but left some stuff not working. Basically any app storing stuff in the windows registry got trashed, and this suprisingly includes Adobe Acrobat v7 user registration data, so I had to re-license that.
The biggest problem was that Bluetooth stopped working. I spent 2 WHOLE DAYS on this and after a lot of work, including rolling back drivers etc I got the laptop to recognise the BT device (a satellite phone) but any modem configured to use the resulting serial port does not work. This config used to be so simple, and it works with the same phone on other devices I have.
Eventually I gave up and decided to restore a Trueimage HD image; last one was 12/2007 but this laptop had not changed much since then with just a few apps installed.
TI v8 did not recognise the SATA HD even when it was BIOS-configured for Compatible IDE mode, but (thanks to the above hint) downloading the 15-day trial TI 2009 from their website worked. The 15-day trial period is in fact immaterial since one needs to merely install the boot disk creator on the target machine, and this bit of TI does not keep track of usage or date... The boot disk creater makes a bootable CD which contains a reasonably full version of TI which does not need windoze to run, supports networks (and networked drives and PCs etc), USB drives & mice etc etc.
So, using TI 2009 boot disk I restored the 12/2007 image.
The laptop works fine as expected.
But bl00dy Bluetooth has not come back!! I can still find the BT phone, pair with it, get a COM port popping up (under Ports in C/Panel), assign a generic 19200 bd modem to that port, and create a dial-up networking connection with that modem. This is the standard procedure. But when I dial (either *99# for GPRS or 1722 for the Thuraya dial-up service) the dialer reports a hardware failure - just as it was doing before the final image restore.
Really weird but this is as far as I can go... What a massive waste of time. I can only imagine that something connected with the SP3 installation trashed some EEPROM config on the Bluetooth radio in the laptop. I could try replacing the BT radio module but probably won't bother - I can connect the phone using a USB cable.