I played around for about 15 min. on a friend's 6-month-old Vista laptop and was presented with a consumer computing experience that almost produced a reappearance of what I had for breakfast a few days earlier.
First, Norton Internet Security's icon would not open when clicked, or even when "open" was chosen on the right-click menu. So that update wasn't done, at least not manually. Then, the Java update that was sensed failed to install. Then SP 1 failed to install. Then the flash player update was sensed, but also failed to install.
And routing wasn't the issue, since both IE and Firefox surfed fine. Actually, 3 security updates did get downloaded and installed automatically, so something's getting done somewhere. [Speculation: looks like a clumsy attempt at security through tight file permissions. That's a sound theory but perhaps implementation was screwed up.]
My fix for this (other than using a non-Redmond product) would be to do the scandisc/defrag equivalents, run the registry cleaner in Norton, then load SP1 from CD. And light a candle and face the east, then reboot again for good measure. How do people put up with such OS crap?
