I gave up trying to make the 1TB SATA my Drive:0 and picked up a cheap 400G IDE which is probably for the best. The three-year-old (Athlon 2400+ or something like that) box will soon be living and breathing again as a game machine and Photoshop workstation. To that end it needs Windows.

After about 90 minutes of Winstall hell I finally got to the Teletubbies starting screen and went to town, clearing up the bullshit, removing all the stupidities from this "Professional" version that Aunt Betty would think are just so peachy which don't even belong on the fucking Home version much less the fucking "Pro", ran some utilities and went to windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Big fun.

I ran XPantispy and, as usual in the Winblows world, rebooted again after getting the MS downloads which finally recognised my video and sound cards. When I went back to get SP2 and the 720MB of additional updates, it failed. The site said that the above-named services (along with Event Viewer which should always be running) had to be running.

I opened up services.msc and started the two killed services. WinUpdate still failed. Checked that EV was running. Killed IE, cleared the cache, restarted. Failed again. Then it dawned on me: on the failure page it says "...services must be running..." Are they checking to see whether they're perm-on? Yes they are. It doesn't matter that they're running during update installation, they must be set to Automatic or MS will refuse to continue.

WTF?!