Microsoft Update Breaks Win XP

[seacue]

I maintain a couple of membership databases written in dBase. They reside on XP and print to a laser printer. This is done through a "net use LPT1: ......." put in "run"

All has worked fine for about a decade - until last week. Trying to write to the laser got the complaint "Can't write to Drive D:" (the optical disk drive). Killing that message gets "Formatted wrong for Drive A:" (the 3.5" floppy drive). Neither made any sense.

The dBase programs could write to a file on drive C: as usual.

The solution was to install NEWER updates. Apparently the XP updates of a couple of weeks ago broke this feature of XP. and was fixed in the latest updates.

GGGRRRrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, we are trying to move from dBase to something more modern.

[Milo Minderbinder]

Something doesn't add up here
Microsoft release updates once a month, on the (West Coast USA) evening of the second tuesday of each month
So, your updates should have come through last week, and the previous ones would have been FIVE weeks ago. The next update from last week is in around three weeks.

Besides which, Microsoft have pretty much given up on new patches for XP - theres just essential security fixes being released. Nothing that should affect a printer redirection issue

I'm guessing, but, your problem seems more likely to be elsewhere - from what you say it looks like your dBase program is trying to access your printer directly using DOS emulation routines. Thats simply not supposed to to work in XP anyway

What were the various patches you installed that broke / fixed it?

[Tarq57]

There were some out-of-band updates released a few days ago. Affected XP here, but not 7.

I had some undesirable side effects from them, but nothing like the above.

They were security updates mainly to do with the dotNet framework, + the MRT, which I though a little unusual. It definitely wasn't 'patch Tuesday'.

[seacue]

I did updates on May 9th and May 24th. May 9th missed the "second Tuesday" update, so it was the April update. May 25th got the May updates.

All I know are the symptoms and what I did which solved them. There had been no changes in the dBase programs since a number of years ago.

seacue

[mustpost]

Confirm, 2 machines which have to run on XP (till they die!) have some anomalies since my prompted manual updates....:*

[P.Pilcher]

I installed my regular monthly updates last week and having done so I noted a problem with an ancient version of CorelDraw that I use in preference to later versions which do no more for me but take an age to load. This problem only occured with my version of XP Pro, not XP Home which I run on my laptop. Shortly after this I noticed the dreaded yellow shield appear again announcing further updates. These also installed but the update shield refused to cancel (after the usual shut down and reboot) and required the installation process to repeat ad infinitum. In the end, I got fet up and went to the Microsoft update website which again stated that I needed to update. I then used this site to carry out the update and this worked. My CorelDraw problems also disappeared at the same time.

P.P.

[vulcanised]

There seems to be an industry campaign at the momemt to peruade people to ditch XP in favour of W7.

Couldn't possibly be related to these problems though :rolleyes:

[Tarq57]

These also installed but the update shield refused to cancel (after the usual shut down and reboot) and required the installation process to repeat ad infinitum. In the end, I got fet up and went to the Microsoft update website which again stated that I needed to update. I then used this site to carry out the update and this worked.
Exactly the problem I had, except the yellow shield kept re-appearing.

Eventually I fixed it by running this (http://support.microsoft.com/mats/windows_update/), twice. I had to run it in 'aggressive' mode the second time.