You know it's bad when you can remember a Microsoft hotfix number by heart. I've been working on this for two days now. Plenty of Google searches and lots of fixes, none of which worked. I shan't list the pages I visited; Google can do that. But I did manage to fix it and have not found my fix anywhere so I'm posting it here in the hope that it helps.
I have an XP Home SP2 installation disk. I did a fresh install, then installed SP3 and then went to Windows Update. It found 3 that were required, Windows Installer, WGA validation and KB898461. 898461 would not install via update or when downloaded to the local machine.
I did a system restore back to factory fresh SP2 straight off the disk, but still no joy.
The fix was to uninstall Windows Uninstaller 3.1, then install KB898461 from the local machine. You'll find the uninstaller here:
C:\WINDOWS\$MSI31Uninstall_KB893803v2$\spuninst\spuninst.exe
Hope this helps someone some day. If it does, drop me a line. You'll find an email link in the footer of my website.
Nice one! You may have saved me hours. I has this exact problem after progressively patching/updating my heavily customised XP media centre - one of the programs needed a dll from that old package, but Windows Update happened to hate that it exists. Uninstalled and fixed, thanks!
This appears pretty high up on Google, by the way.
Posted by: DFer | 01/02/2010 at 06:56 PM
Fantastic! I knew it was worth posting this! Thanks for registering to comment. You made my day!
Posted by: Cams | 01/03/2010 at 02:47 AM