First Look at "Official" XP SP3

A couple days ago, I booted into my Windows XP Home installation (yes, blasphemy, I know) in order to pull some pictures off of a Sony Memory Stick, since Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognize the card when I plug it into my card reader. In the course of performing the Windows Updates that I had long been delinquent on, the MS Update site offered to let me download and install Windows XP SP3. I had some free time so, heck, why not?

Since my switch to nearly-all-linux, I had shrunk my Windows partition down to the minimum to hold all the programs I had installed, the OS itself, and about 1 GB of free space. Seems my 1 GB had been reduced in my sparse Windows use; the SP3 download required roughly 370MB, and the installation another 370MB, and I had to find just a tad more free space. :)

After the install (and the ever-needed reboot), there were a couple major problems with my computer. Most major was the complete destruction of my theme capabilities. I'm quite fond of the infamous UXTheme hack; however, after applying the hack for SP3 (and probably before, but I'll have to check), I could not use any UI themes, not even the default Luna theme. I kept getting an error that the theme couldn't load because the file couldn't load...

As tragic as it is that I could not use any window themes, at least I can still use the computer. Well, my Root account, anyway; my limited user account threw an error when I logged in saying that explorer.exe couldn't initialize properly. Clicking the OK button continued the login process, only to login to a completely empty desktop. Explorer failed to load, which in turn kept the desktop, taskbar, etc from loading. I was able to pull up the Task Manager, but attempting to start Explorer.exe from the new task option threw the same error. I was able to "work around" this major issue by creating a new limited user account (which logged in perfectly fine), but I ended up running out of space while attempting to copy the Docs & Settings directory from the old account to the new account.

Turns out SP3 is placed in the Add/Remove programs list. I'm going to uninstall SP3, check if any of these problems reoccur under SP2, then try re-installing SP3 and see if it works any better. Maybe I messed something up during the install. Or maybe SP3 isn't ready for the masses yet.