Judy, My particular case is that somehow the registry had been set so that it would not accept SP3. I had discovered that daily my computer would try to download SP3 automatically, and then give up and leave "as is". I tried to manually install, and that wouldn't work. Turns out there was a small percentage of XP computers that had that particular registry problem blocking SP3, and MS had a "fix". (Ha!) It consisted of copying an executable program in Notepad, and then running the program to change the registry. It advised backing up the registry, and advice told me how to save the registry in "restore". The program did not work. Restore did not work. My USB "safe to unlug" notice stopped working, AOL stopped loading, and a few other small things like "restore" aren't working quite right. I'm going to reformat and reinstall XP to get everything working right again. So, in my case, SP3 simply would not install. If your SP3 installs, you should be OK. And in my case, I need to learn a better way of backing up the registry before I mess with it again. Woody -----Original Message----- From: Judy Florian <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:47 pm Subject: [AOL-RW] OT: MS SP3 (Woody) Tell me about SP3. I haven't dowloaded it -- still. I had enough trouble going from SP1 to SP2. I'm on WinXP. What OS do you use and what problems did SP3 cause to your PC? (Is that enough initialisms for everyone to read today? LOL) Judy ************************************** See what's new at http://www.aol.com