Some updates could not be installed.

Recently I performed a repair install of Windows XP SP 2. When the repair was finished, my computer notified me there were some updates available. In fact, there were ninety-something updates available.

After thinking about it for a few seconds, this made some sense to me. I had just used my XP SP 2 CD to repair my system, so basically that's all I had here. Just an SP 2 system with no updates installed.

So I let it download all the updates, but when it came time to install every last one of them failed.

What?!?

This was the automatic update I'm talking about here, so I went to the Windows Update web site and tried to update from there. Same result.

When I was at the Windows Update web site I noticed SP 3 was now available (It hadn't been previously), so I decided to see if I had any better luck with that.

Nope.

Well, what now?

I googled around for a few minutes and found this Microsoft KB article (943144) about the problem. The solution was pretty easy and took only a few seconds to do. It worked beautifully

Now that my newly repaired and updated system is up and running smoothly once more, I am again basking in computing bliss.