Sunstorm Labs Blog

As it turns out, I share a birthday with the Windows OS. Windows is exactly one year older than me. I’ll drink to that.

I am not the only one.

Nifty.

I left Windows Update installing Vista SP1 today, however, instead of a nice and upgraded system, I got locked out of my computer with this lovely message:

Vista screwed itself over

Clicking on Learn More Online took me Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage validation site, which happily reported that my copy of Vista isn’t genuine, with error code 0xc004d401. It was convinced that I had some kind of incompatible software that was interfering with validation, and gave me a list of anti-virus and malware checker programs that have been known to cause this problem. Obviously, I had none of them, or at all, ever.

It turns out that this was caused by Vista hosing itself while trying to update to SP1. I’m not sure if it’s caused specifically by SP1, or any of the updates that I installed before SP1, but actually getting SP1 to install fixes the problem. Microsoft’s suggestion to reboot into safe mode won’t help, because you can run neither WGA, or Windows Update from there. Luckily, It doesn’t take much to circumvent the lockout.

1. Click on Learn More Online
2. Type in “file:///c:”, without the quotes. This will get you into Explorer.
3. Use the Folders pane to navigate to the Control Panel, at the bottom.
4. Use the little arrow to expand it, and open Windows Update.
5. Check for updates. If you have SP1 waiting for you, download and install.

If that doesn’t work for you, or SP1 doesn’t show up as an update, then you likely have a different problem. You can still make life easier for yourself by navigating to the Windows directory and from there launching Explorer.exe, which will give you your desktop back. Some things will be disabled, and you’ll have a memory quota that’ll only allow you to launch two or three programs at a time, but it’ll make troubleshooting a bit less painful.

I installed SP1 and the problem went away, and Windows validates fine now. I was tipped off to a failed SP1 install being the culprit, because there was a task in the Task Scheduler that called for a “HitmanSp1.exe” (which didn’t exist) to be launched. Microsoft, your killers fail again!

An exotic application of Vista’s search feature is that you can get a flat directory view in Explorer simply by going to the folder you want and typing in “*” (no quotes) in the search field. Then just add the “Folder Path” field by right clicking on the headers and picking “More…”

Flat directory view in Vista Explorer

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