The suspicious death of XP support

As Microsoft slowly kills off Windows XP itself — over the protest of many users — it’s still unclear exactly when Redmond will formally cut off all support for its old OS. But one reader’s experience in dealing with a series of update fiascos over the last few months suggests that XP support may actually have expired already, and under suspicious circumstances.

“I lost my XP system near the middle of May, and it took me until the end of June to get it back,” the reader wrote. “What happened was that, suddenly, all of my hardware disappeared from the Windows device manager as did my administrator privileges. I had a lot of licensed apps on my system, and the prospect of starting with a fresh install was too daunting, so I decided to recover instead. During this time, I spent over eight cumulative hours talking to Microsoft’s Indian ‘support technicians.’ I was at least six hours into that ordeal before I finally spoke with one that had a small clue what he was talking about.”

Microsoft support led the reader on a merry chase without coming close to identifying the problem. “I’d perform one repair install after another, and there’d always be something that wouldn’t work. Sometimes it was Administrator privileges, sometimes it was scripting, sometimes it was the MSI installer, sometimes it was Windows updates and sometimes it was Windows activation, which would reset itself for no apparent reason. Naturally, during every step of this, I had to do detailed malware scans, and although Norton proclaimed my broken system virus free, I had my doubts. Not until I had exercised four different anti-spyware utilities and five rootkit detectors did I become fully convinced that malware was not to blame.”

Microsoft wasn’t the only company giving the reader a problem, though. “You might be asking, ‘What about your backups? You did have recent image backups, didn’t you?’ I had a lot of them, but they’d been made with Acronis True Image version 11, which backs up to and from RAID arrays without a hiccup, but can’t restore them. As my C: drive is a RAID 0 array, this came as a nasty surprise. I’m convinced that Acronis broke their latest release to rush Vista compatibility out the door. If my suspicion is correct, they certainly aren’t alone. Some Vista capable updates don’t work nearly as well with XP as their predecessors. At any rate, I’ve now switched to ShadowProtect, which should hopefully provide usable image backups.”

Once he realized neither Microsoft nor Acronis was going to help him, the reader spent six weeks researching on his own. Ultimately he found a way using BartPE to restore an earlier True Image backup of the system. And what had caused the Windows device manager to disappear in the first place?

“I finally found the answer on Symantec’s website after it was too late to help me. It said that when you install Windows Service Pack 3, a tool called Fixccs.exe adds numerous registry keys in many locations but is unable to remove them. And among the symptoms those registry keys cause is an empty Windows device manager. I had installed XP SP3 a couple of days before my system died. To date, I have not been able to find anything on Microsoft’s site that acknowledges this condition or suggests a remedy.”

Having restored his system, the reader was just getting ready to write me about his experience when he suddenly lost his Internet connection. “This was due to another of Microsoft’s quality control slipups, which they so far have not deigned to mention. I’m a registered ZoneAlarm user, and Checkpoint/ZoneAlarm provided the resolution by e-mail alert. Fortunately, because I had done a Windows update shortly before I noticed the problem, and I’d already guessed it was the source of the problem and uninstalled it. Had I not done so, I would have been unable to receive Checkpoints’s security alert warning that Microsoft Update KB951748 causes ZoneAlarm users on XP systems to lose connectivity.”

Many readers ran into this problem with ZoneAlarm and the Windows update last week, and while it isn’t yet clear what caused the conflict, only one of the companies seems to be doing anything about it. “Again, not a peep has been heard from Microsoft about this issue,” the reader wrote. “ZoneAlarm had to issue an entire new version to correct the problem.”

The real issue in all of this, the reader concludes, is Microsoft’s lack of competence in supporting XP. “Microsoft has done nothing to address the nightmares their woefully untested service packs and upgrades have caused some of their customers. I spent six weeks trying to correct their SP3 screw up and another hour with KB951748. Microsoft should have identified both of these as known issues within a day or two of their release, and they should be have been responsible for alerting their customers and fixing their code. At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if any malware can do more damage to my system than Microsoft has in their attempts to secure it.”

There doesn’t seem much doubt that XP support is dead. The question is whether it was killed by incompetence, indifference, or malicious intent. What do you think? Post your comments below or write Ed Foster at Foster@gripe2ed.com.