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I have a HP desktop used by my family. In the past before I started running two programs, Spybot and Ad-Aware 6.0, I was able to use automatic update from microsoft. But after using them, I have not been able to download SP2. When the update tries to install the service pack, it says "Windows Service Pack 2 cannot install. The product key used to install Microsoft Windows may not be valid." There were a few times that someone who uses the computer ran ad-aware and removed everything that came up. Could they have removes a registry key or something which would cause this? How can I tell if this happened? Any help would be appreciated.
If you can't get it to download and install using Windows update, you can try downloading the full installation to your desktop and running it there.
Yu can find the download page here
Michael J
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I seem to recall that there was a problem with HP's and SP2. Check the HP website and see if there's a patch available.
Please let us know if you found someone's advice to be helpful.
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As far as I'm aware you don't needed any or all of SP1 to install SP2 !
Don't really see how AdAware or Spybot would have caused this problem.
Notwithstanding response #3 download and run is the way to go.
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elizabeth, perhaps you need to forget about the download and go the free CD route. I got mine at Staples to avoid a long download on dialup. At one time, you could get a free CD from Staples, Computer City, Best Buy or via snail mail from M$. Dunno if you still can, ask? My SWAG is that your registration key cookie got inadvertantly deleted and M$ doesn't recognize you as a friend.
HTH.
Ed in Texas.
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Ed,
How can I tell if my registration key cookie got deleted? Where do I look to find out? Thank you all for your help.
Elizabeth
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I ran into this problem on a customer's computer and when I searched the error on the internet, I was linked to an article that SP2 will not load on pirated copies of Windows XP. If you know that you have the original OEM license, then I would contact HP, as suggested above. However, if you bought the computer second hand and you dont have any of the original CDs, you may in fact have an illegal copy of the software. SP2 will not load on known illegal copies of Windows XP. Microsoft did this by design. In the case we found, it turns out a guy is building PCs out of his house and reselling his copy of XP over and over again and somehow cracking the activation.
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