Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2

also for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

[bill]

According to Microsoft the SP2 update [microsoft.com] can be applied to all Windows Server 2003 products and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

This does not appear to be as big of an update as SP1 was. SP2 was released quietly on Tuesday this week and it doesn't even show up on Windows Update. If you really want this collection of bug fixes and patches you'll have to find it on your own. It doesn't look like MS is pushing this one on us.

[Ocean10000]

Funny thing yesterday when I was doing an update using "Windows Update" it actually downloaded sp2 and installed it for me for Win2k3. Maybe they didn't have it on Windows Update when you checked, but they did last night when I did.

[bill]

Guess I checked too early. ;) I see it now.

[bill]

You might want to hold off on an automatic update to SP2. There are some troubles with the package already.

Release Notes for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 [technet2.microsoft.com]

There are a few issues addressed including this one:

Internet Explorer

If you installed Internet Explorer 7 after installing Windows Server 2003 SP1, you must uninstall Internet Explorer 7 before you install Windows Server 2003 SP2.

This could affect a lot of people. I'm fortunate not to have updated to IE7 on my server.

If you're having troubles with your SP2 update I suggest you read the article and see if the workarounds help.

[Easy_Coder]

They're (microsoft) confusing people again... yesterday in the IE Blog they wrote:

IE7 users can upgrade directly to Windows Server 2003 SP2 without uninstalling IE7 first. There has been some confusion around this point. We are in the process of updating the release notes to clarify this issue.

I'm sitting tight until it settles down.

[ByronM]

I've done a few dozen SBS 2003 R2 servers without a problem. Infact for me the memory footprint went DOWN.

I also rolled out vista integration patches as well and didn't remove IE7 as i saw the notes from the IE team saying it wasn't required.

We had been testing the RC on many servers so it wasn't anything new.

[Robert Charlton]

You might want to hold off on an automatic update to SP2. There are some troubles with the package already.

Don't take this as advice that should be emulated, as it may be the wrong thing to do, but I always hold off on the MS updates, unless there's a critical danger.

[bill]

That's not bad advice in most cases. I've always had the updates set to notify me when patches are ready, but I manually go through the list and install each of them. Automatic install is just a bit too risky.

We've already seen that there's a problem with the browscap.ini file [webmasterworld.com] included in SP2.

It's easy to get lulled into a pattern of automatically accepting the updates that MS puts out. This is an example of why you should not.

[bill]

An update from the MS IE blog [blogs.msdn.com]:

IE7 users can upgrade directly to Windows Server 2003 SP2 without uninstalling IE7 first. There has been some confusion around this point. We are in the process of updating the release notes to clarify this issue.

We encourage all of our Windows Server 2003 users to update their systems to this service pack.

The SP2 release notes [download.microsoft.com] also now indicate that uninstallation of IE7 is not necessary.