Hello all. I have a desktop machine here which is giving me problems. It came in because the sound had 'gone' - which it had indeed, and I ended up putting a card in because I could not find any clue as to what the make of the sound chip was, and that is working ok. However, the machine ( XPHome) has never been upgraded and seemed to have no protection at all at present, although there is some indication that Norton's has been on there in the past. I am suspicious that something nasty has been at work as there is no sign of a security centre or firewall icon or automatic update icons in Control Panel, and I thought that there should be, but the antispyware I put on has not turned much up apart from cookies ( this machine has not been on the net for a while) just one dialer, and Spybot S&D did not flag up any changes in the registry about disabled av or firewall status.
So...better update I thought - but I can't.

If I go onto the web to Microsoft's site, I get told that my security settings do not allow Active X to be installed, except I have reduced security to the point that the machine will let anything on, with no difference. Nor do I get the bar allowing me to install Active X.

So I downloaded the SP2 on my own machine and copied it over to the desktop of XPHome. However, when it runs the exe and loads all the files to the temp directory it creates, there is a pause and then it tells me that it cannot find the file specified, so setup is aborted.

I looked this up on the net and CastleCops says that that message can indicate that BITS is corrupted, but the fix they offer is only applicable to a system already running SP2.

So am I stuck?
The OS was pre-installed so no disk, and my disk is already SP2, so I can't run sfc /scannow.

I made sure BITS was started and set to automatic, but it has made no difference.

What else can I try?

Once I have sp2 on the machine, I can run my copy of the OS to see what else there might be a problem with.

Any thoughts ( she asks hopefully?)