You know it’s bad when you can remember a Microsoft hotfix number by heart. I’ve been working on this for two days now. Plenty of Google searches and lots of fixes, none of which worked. I shan’t list the pages I visited; Google can do that. But I did manage to fix it and have not found my fix anywhere so I’m posting it here in the hope that it helps.
I have an XP Home SP2 installation disk. I did a fresh install, then installed SP3 and then went to Windows Update. It found 3 that were required, Windows Installer, WGA validation and KB898461. 898461 would not install via update or when downloaded to the local machine.
I did a system restore back to factory fresh SP2 straight off the disk, but still no joy.
The fix was to uninstall Windows Uninstaller 3.1, then install KB898461 from the local machine. You’ll find the uninstaller here:
UPDATE:
I migrated my blog and the links have broken 🙁 In an attempt to find the solution again, I came across this, which allegedly fixes the problem as well. I haven’t tried it myself, so YMMV.
