I was intentionally not a first adopter on XPSP2 because of the problems some had with installation, but yesterday I attempted to install it on my secondary computer at home.  This isn’t your normal e-mail/MS Word computer.  This computer has so many peripherals attached to it that it’s hard to route the wires.  Two video cards, 3 hard drives, 2 optical.  and it has so much software on it that Program Files is around 20GB by itself.  VS 2002 and 2003, Virtual PC, Adobe stuff, SQL Server, IIS, etc.  While I was away in Iraq for 14 months, I had it set to auto-update so my wife didn’t have to mess with it, so it’s always had the latest patches.  I run Ad-aware and Norton anti virus, and I have to say that I don’t have any spy ware or viruses.  Norton hasn’t caught anything in over 2 years, and I keep it up to date (I don’t open email attachments from strangers).

I was a little uneasy about installing XPSP2 because some people have had problems, but I’ve always had success with MS’s patches.  I shut everything down and turned Norton off and then proceeded to install.  The install went fine, and everything is great.  In the back of my head I wonder if the people who had problems left programs running during the install, left anti-virus on, actually continued to work during the install, or something else besides:  shut down all programs (even extra services you have running – sql server) and let the computer do its thing. 

All in all, it has been as painless as every other MS patch that has been automatically installed.