tompaulco's Journal: Time to reinstall windows

It used to be an every 6 month chore to reinstall windows back in the old Windows NT 3.51 and Windows 95 days. But after working with Windows 4.0 and 2000 and XP for the last few years, I had thought reinstalling Windows was a thing of the past. But not so! The day before yesterday, while working happily on my computer, I noticed Windows Update wanted to install some things. So I let it. BIG mistake. HUGE. After rebooting and logging back in, Windows Explorer throws an error. Then Dr. Watson throws an error. Every icon I doubleclick or right click throws a Windows Explorer error and a Dr. Watson error. Then I have to kill both instances of Dr. Watson before I can even get focus back. After that, the cycle just repeats itself. And of course, Clicking the Start Menu does the same thing. I try several different user profiles to see if the problem is only with mine. It's not.
I boot into safe mode and the same problem happens, but luckily after the first error, I am able to click some of my other icons. I attempt to run adaware, but after 25 minutes of scanning, (and finding about 83 things), it throws an error and dies. I try rebooting several times. Annoyingly, I am unable to log off in safe mode, so I have to keep physically powering off.
At one point, after allowing my computer to send the results of an error to Microsoft, I get a message back from Microsoft saying that the error is caused by LAME MP3 codec. Well, I decide to go ahead and uninstall the program that uses that, just in case. Unfortunately, it will not uninstallin safe mode, and I can not get to the uninstall window in normal mode.
I run the windows file checker utility to make sure the original versions of all windows executables are in place. It exits without saying anything, which I don't know if that is normal or not. But it sure didn't fix anything, as the problem still persists.
I download and reinstall XP service Pack 2. It doesn't immediately solve my problem of not being able to shut down cleanly when in safe mode. But when booting back up in normal mode, the windows explorer problem appears to be fixed. The computer works fine all day.
Then this morning I wake up to find that Windows Update has downloaded some more files to my computer and automatically rebooted. Once again, I get the windows explorer and Dr. Watson errors on everything I touch. One more time, I will try reinstalling SP2. Plus I am disabling Windows update. The exploits from the script kiddies cause much less damage and stress than the Windows Update is causing me.
If SP2 doesn't work this time, I guess it is time to reinstall Windows.