MS10-015 bulletin - possible BSOD with never ending boot cycles

“…oops I did it again…”  No we are not going to discuss Britney Spears but some folks at Microsoft are scrambling for answers after a serious update failure.  The MS10-015  update bulletin is causing some systems to lock up and then during the boot up they BSOD into a never ending boot cycle.  Ouch.

Here is the crazy part of the equation, some systems do just fine.  I have tested the updates on 10 workstations and 4 have crashed out and died while the other 6 were perfectly fine.  I need to clarify one piece though, each of these systems are exactly the same…EXACTLY.  Each one is a virtual desktop with the exact same applications, updates and I used the exact same disc to build the machines.  I ran updates on all 10 systems one at a time.

On the four dead systems here is what I did to repair them.

• Boot from your Windows XP CD or DVD and start the recovery console
• Once at the repair screen - Type this command: CHDIR $NtUninstallKB977165$\spuninst and hit ENTER
• Type this command: BATCH spuninst.txt and hit ENTER
• Type this command: systemroot and hit ENTER
• When complete, type this command: exit and hit ENTER

Of course this may or may not fix your system, but so far it has worked for my dead test systems.

Confused?  You are not alone on this one.  Folks have been trying to figure out what happened and everyone seems to be testing this like crazy.  My final thought on the issue…TOO MANY security fixes and tweaks in one bulletin.  Each time Microsoft tries to update systems with a large amount of security fixes and tweaks it seems like they get a large amount of failures.  Seems like they should have broke this months updates into 2 for the month…which they have done before.

Other related stories on this issue.
MS update gives some XP boxes the Blue Screen
New Patches Cause BSoD for Some Windows XP Users

Microsoft Blog post on this issue.
Restart issues after installing MS10-015

Microsoft’s workaround for this issue.
Microsoft Security Advisory: Vulnerability in Windows Kernel could allow elevation of privilege

As always, enjoy your updating and let us know if you encounter any other nasty issues.

posted by: Myke Reinhold

This entry was posted on 14. February 2010 at 19:56 and is filed under Security, Microsoft, Desktops, Laptops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.