TSGL: A curly XP Service Pack 2 query

[The Computer Whisperer]

Hi all,

I was at a customer's place today and he had an illigitimate(did i
spell that right?lol) copy of xp on his machine, he has never been
able to upgrade to Service Pack 2.

I ran mike devlin's XP serial changer as a workaround, then installed SP2.

Ok, so up until this point it was all good.

Whilst installing SP2, Avast Anti-Virus was picking up that there was
a virus(trojan horse) in some net file, it started with net, i dont
recall what the full file name was, but when the SP2 install finished,
and the computer restarted, everything was totally F'd.

It took an incredible amount of time to load the windows user
interface, and when it was loaded, there were all sorts of bits and
pieces of windows that didn't work. Also, the computer takes ages to
shut down, so long that I never actually waited for it to finish
shutting down.

Also, there is now no networking connection. it was running a SMC
EZconnect USB to Ethernet adaptor. I will be replacing it with a
network card.

It took me a while to find a workaround to open control panel, none of
the normal options worked.

The Task Bar had diminshed to a 1/4 size gray line on the bottom of
the screen, Start Menu was non-existant, no icons on the desktop, the
background was still there.

Uninstalling SP2 got the start menu back, and the desktop icons.

When I minimise an application it doesn't minimise to the task bar, it
minimises to a small floating title bar with the 3 regular icons on
it.

There are 2 items in Device Manager that are not functioning, one of
them is a USB Root Hub (i think this is my first approach to solving
the problem, reloading motherboard drivers etc), and another is an
unknown device.

I brought the computer back to the office so I could work on it over
the weekend, whilst on-site I tried uninstalling SP2. I will reinstall
this weekend

Are any of you experts out there able to solve this problem or have
you ever experienced problems with installing SP2? etc etc??????

sfc /scannow did not work.

Thanks,

Justin

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