My experience may not be typical, but I thought I would share this hassle with you. Having been prompted by MS that downloads awaited me I found that I had downloaded SP2. For the next 2 weeks, this slowed my PC down to such a degree that my 1.1Mbps broadband was behaving like a dial-up service.

In the end, I uninstalled SP2 and my broadband performance is back to normal. Has anyone had similar problems?

<small>[ 08 November 2004, 07:26 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

No, I have not had such problems.

However, to NOT install SP2 is to put yourself at a very serious risk for viruses. Without it, you can get a virus these days even just by LOOKING at a website.

SP2 might behave badly with anti-virus software. On one computer, I found that Norton Anti-Virus caused Mozilla to run at a crawl. Removing the anti-virus (which was out of date anyway) fixed the problem.

I would suggest maybe re-build your computer. Run the system restore to get it back to factory settings, then run Windows updates a bunch of times until there are no more to install. One of them will be SP2. It takes about 3 hours for the process.

This whole thing is easiest if you have a second hard drive. That way, you can keep your data on one while you re-install Windows on the other. There are various ways this might be done.

I've done that upgrade on several computers without a hitch. I suspect there's something else on your computer that's causing the problem, perhaps a background utility like an anti-virus, firewall program, pop-up blocker etc.

Also, if you do what CitiBob suggests, please back up your data first...

Thanks a lot guys - I'll check out your suggestions.