I know of this happening possibly to a friends PC. They said the last thing they did was run update for windows and then their computer came back on and they went directly to the first website after the update and then the computer just died on them. They tried several things and were not able to get the PC booted up, and upon placing in the media disc to repair, it had a crack in it!!! Go figure, just when you need the darn thing it doesnt work. The computer was running Windows Vista Home Basic and the company wanted $32 for a new disc, but I asked for the supervisor and then told him about the small crack and he said it could have happened anywhere, so he agreed after a short arguement (conversation) lol that he would ship me a new disc so that either myself or my highly skilled cousin could get this PC back up again. We both tried all the advanced boot up configs and nothing seemed to bring this PC back on. We kept on getting an error message saying Windows 32 and then a whole host of numbers and stuff so we are hoping that the disc works upon arrival. I will say this, first Microsoft makes us all wait and then this kind of stuff happens, what a joke for people like myself waiting on this what I thought (much needed) vista boost and now this kind of thing happens. I am about 98% sure it was the windows updater. Thanks and I hope you all get this issue resolved as well, and do better than my friend, take care of your windows back up disc, that thing can be like GOLD sometimes when needed!!!

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"Every Man Dies, Not Every Man Really Lives"

On a DELL inspiron 530 running Vista Home Premium, I ran into continuous reboot problem. Using F8 key at reboot got a diagnostic menu to do a system restore to the previous day. Iturned off automatic updates and investigated finding the culprit update mentioned had failed. Interestingly despite turning off auto-update 2 more updates installed the following day ???? I decided to re-install the update manually and all worked fine

Opinions do vary but user complaints and hackers are behind all the updates MS sends out . Why wouldn't you want the OS to FIX reported problems that have happened to others and save you some grief? As far as taking over our machines, thats gonna happen anyway. Whatever we do now is or can be monitored by big brother that's a fact of life.

If the changes made today were on your original disk at install, would you call them changes? From customer experiences over time, changes will be made to better THEIR OS with updates. You on the other hand THAN exercise your option to change what you don't approve of at any time. You gotta believe that THEY really don't give a hoot about controlling your computer but only want to improve something they sold to you. System Restore or Internet Opinions will change back to what every you had before those undesired updates and set up what your comfortable with. If your concerned about piracy or PC take over I'd go back to windows 95. Nobody will bother you there.

It is a matter of control..... An IT group needs to feel that they have control over their environment.There are lots of pressures everyday without having to worry about some 3rd party (MS in this case) screwing things up.

LOL.... "Who in their right mind would install VISTA " ......we can stop there....that's a good quote....
the scenario is fictional, but similar circumstances has happened before with auto updates and or WSUS servers on XP machines. Vista is not ready for the enterprise and I would feel sorry for anyone stuck using it. The only people at any of my customers that have it, are those misinformed folks who went to their local store to pickup a "cheap" laptop.

Just uninstalled all Windows Vista updates dated 2-15 and 2-18. My computer now boots up ONCE ONLY and appears to function normally once again.

Thanks to PC World for this very timely article!!!!