Hey all!

Last night, I upgraded to SP2. Since then, random programs have been crashing saying "wininet.dll has performed an illegal operation". I click the okay button, restart the program, and everything continues to work fine. So far this happened to explorer.exe, msnmsgr.exe, and aim.exe all within a 10 minute span.

Please help an admin out
TIA, Dani

Dani,

Well, it might not be what you need, but there does seem to be a number of problems with SP2 that can be traced back to it's habit of defaulting to DEP being turned on by default. Look in the 'Things you should know before installing SP2' thread stickied up top of this forum, I posted a problem with DiVX and SP2, if you follow the link I put there, there is a link to a page that tells you how to disable DEP for now, and for lack of any better advice right off, I'd try disabling DEP right off, to see if it solves your problem.

Let me know how it goes, as I'm rather curious to see if this is the root of your problem, as it is the source of many others it seems.

Thanks! I'll take a look at that thread and I'll keep you posted. I actually have a DriveImage image of my drive from right before I installed SP2. So worst comes to worst, it will take 20 minutes to roll back to a clean, pre-SP2 machine.

Hopefully, you won't have to resort to that though. Keeping my fingers crossed here!

*update* Don't mean to bump this thread, but just to add that I checked the link to software that is incompatible with SP2 and I'm not using any of it. I am using McAfee however.

Understood, however this DEP thing has been causing headaches for lots of users from what I've been seeing, and since you started having problems right after installing XP SP2, and your problems are similar, I'd still recommend you try disabling DEP to see if that fixes it. You lose DEP's added security, (which is an unkown factor right now anyway, it's a great idea that so far only AMD's latest chips directly support), but you'll get to keep all the other security features of SP2 if disabling DEP works.

Feature disabled. So we shall see :-D

Can't wait to see the results, if any.

Here's something for you to play with, if this fixes it: There is another way to mess with DEP, I'll show you where to poke around.

Open Control Panel, pick Performance and Maintenance, pick System, pick Advanced, pick the Settings button on Performance, and you should find a new page for DEP where you can tell it what programs to protect. If you feel adventurous sometime, you could re-enable DEP, and go play around in there to see if you can include or exclude a program from being protected by DEP. You'd have to figure out a lot of it on your own though, since it is such a new feature, but there it is.

That's the first such problem I've seen realated to core internet components, Dani, and the odd one out there is AIM.

How did you update? Auto update? Download the web install? I downloaded the full 270Mb package and installed from that, and haven't struck a single problem, but before trying it that way I'd be suspecting:

Browser extensions?
DEP as DuncanIdaho has suggested?
A sneaky bit of spyware that's got in?
Active desktop objects that are perhaps misbehaving?

wininet.dll should be clean and updated after a SP install, surely, so something must be playing silly buggers with it. Otherwise it'd have to be a botched Service Pack install.

Could also be an older driver lurking around in her system, as well, as that has been reported around the Net as being a fairly common problem with DEP/SP2.

Good thought, btw, on the Active Desktop objects.