Of all the evil things Bill Gates unleashed upon the world, none is a frustrating as Windows Auto Update!  Even when set to only to down load an update, there is no way to check the file and make sure that it will not deactivate or destroy an important driver for the computer you are using.  I try to keep my computer safe from the evil world of the internet and use fire wall, anti virus, anti spam, pop up blocker software and regularly update them.  My incoming and outgoing emails are filtered and checked to try to ensure my computer is safe.  The only outside intrusions that get through are the ones officially sanctioned by Microsoft.

About every 3 months, Microsoft will have a vicious update that reorders, damages, or destroys a driver in my system.  Sometimes I am able to find a new driver that repairs my computer, and sometimes I can't.  The updates that cause the most insidious damage, are the ones that reorder the drivers.  In my favorite system were 10 large hard drives each containing photographic images of a particular genre I produce.  The motherboard had built in support for 4 IDE devices (DVD Burner and 3 hard drives including the boot drive were here), 4 SATA drives and the remaining drives were coming off of a PCI  IDE card controller.  Periodically, an update would come in from Microsoft that would tell my computer to boot off the SATA drive even though the computer's firmware boot order was CD/DVD drive (IDE0 slave), hard drive (IDE0 master).  The only solution to this was to replace the Microsoft Windows XP Pro CD into the DVD drive, boot up and repair the Windows installation.

Service pack updates were the most dangerous ones I encountered, even more so when they re ordered the Microsoft updates they incorporated.  It was a Service Pack 2 update that destroyed the sound on my Gigabyte motherboard because it reordered the load order for the sound driver, a solution to their original problem with the sound driver they chose to ignore!  I bought an Asus motherboard in order to enjoy sound while working on my photography due to that lunacy.

The Asus board worked great for just over 2 years, with the ocassional burp from Windows Auto Update causing minor problems here and there, but I ws able to remedy most of those problems by uploading new drivers, saving them to a cd and installing them as soon as a problem warranted doing so.  Then came a driver problem I couldn't ignore.  my original Windows boot drive failed.  I reinstalled windows onto a backup drive and thought I had a working system until the updates came through.  Somewhere after Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 got installed, the IDE controller chip on the ASUS started experiencing heat stress problems.  It eventually failed to the point I couldn't get the system to recognize any drives.

I installed the drives into a new Intel motherboard which started to have similar problems.  I wiped the C: drive and reloaded Windows XP Pro.  I downloaded and installed the most up to date drivers for the system I could find.  I then let Windows start updating.  It took over 2 weeks to restore the system to a point that it is usable and stable.  I have no further plans to update that computer again. 

The rebuilding of this computer started to interfere with some photography deadlines so I ended up investing in a brand new computer with Windows Vista on it.   The first service pack update took out my card reader.  I had to install a new driver for it.  It looks like a new nightmare is beginning!