AMD processor are major to be affected i guess..

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/05/09/xp-sp3-crash...

It turned me into a newt!

I don't seem to have encountered any issues and I work at a radio station with custom software and wonky audio apps. I did heavy testing and pushed the update via WSUS to 100+ machines. So far all seems well. I am fearing the Office upgrade more.

Weird.. I have it on both MCE 2005 boxes and my work laptop. I actually had a choice in installing it to. All network drives work.. no rebooting freezing etc.. everything is running great so far....

It's a service pack.... there are obviously going to be problems.

Well, as usual, we'll hear about 100% of the people who have problems and 1% of the people who don't. Which doesn't make the problems any less severe for those who have them, but given how many XP systems there are out there in the world even a tiny rate of incompatibility will affect hundreds of people -- and we'll hear from every single one of them. (There were a bunch of people who had problems with SP2 also, and an additional bunch of people who refused to install it for a long time for that reason).

I still think it's a good idea to download the SP separately (all 324MB of it) and then install it explicitly, rather than relying on Windows update to do it.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=5B33B5A8-5...

Microsoft really needs to make the recovery process more automated, or at least better documented within the recovery console itself.

Summary:

Me: Never had any problems doing SPs. Always keep up with current OS and changes.

Happening: Dell work laptop. Upgraded to SP3. System reboots. Blue screen: "Missing GDI32.DLL" so it will not load into Windows at all. Restart. Safe Mode. Blue screen "Missing GDI32.DLL." No boot into safe mode. Use Windows recovery off SP2 disc. Boots fine. Install SP3. No blue screen. Instead: "Hal.dll missing or corrupt, reinstall it." Boot Windows SP2 disc, no repair option, no Windows install detected. Cried for 2 hours. Googled "Hal.dll." Installed Winows SP2 in a different directory, copied boot.ini and hal.dll to old windows directory, changed boot.ini file to boot old windows directory, booted, saved. Phew. Working SP2 again. Installed SP3. Worked. 3rd times a charm? Yay me. No work data loss. Reminds self why backups are important. Backs up files. Done. Go me go. Finally on SP3 baby.

Ha! Take that, Ecks Pee!
<villainous laughter>

Wow, Microsoft has been on a roll with their service pack releases recently.

A quote from my company's IT service desk:

Initial test results found the service pack to break several applications, some critical to user productivity. Based on this information we are asking people not to install this service pack on their computer.

Bad XPSP3 makes XP baad and Vista good, Vista sales go up, it's all good :D

But if seriously I much rather use slipstreamed version + clean install. Upgrade process is always long and often painful.

MS strategy to move people to Vista?

Nah.

I bet a lot of these issues are from people who have systems that were already exhibiting issues and hoped installing SP3 would solve them. But only made things worse.

I installed it on one of my work PC's that has to stay on XP for our VOIP and it went through fine. Of course this was on a clean install also. Which should be the recommended way to do it if not slipstreaming it into a XP CD and re-install the whole OS. Not really an option for you average user that has been running the same installed OS since they bought the PC back in 2002.

It wasn't quick but was painless enough. no crashing or anything ons Dell laptop yet.......

No problems on either my home custom or the Dells at work, so far.

I have done 3 computers so far and "quick and painless" would be a good description.