The Iron Yuppie

I'm going to try to use as many searchable words as possible in the following post. When I was doing my recent install of SP1 for Windows Server 2003, I had the hardest time finding out why it kept failing because it kept coming up with the same meaningless error box: "Access Denied". Are you really so short on characters that you're worried about running out of text and have to put up something that brief? It turns out that the problem was probably my fault, in that I was trying to lock down my machine and probably dropped the write permission on a specific registry key. The key in question was:

• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck

Well, you could have printed that out, or at LEAST pointed at a log and told me where to look!

Turns out that everything DID get logged, and once someone told me where to look ("setupapi.log") it was easy to do a search on "Access Denied" and find the following:

• #-086 Deleting registry value "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\KernelFaultCheck"
• #E033 Error 5: Access is denied.

Look, MS (and all other SW makers), I know you're trying to get stuff out, but help us do some digging on our own! You could do any of the following:

• Print out the error location/library where it failed
• Print out a more specific error name/value
• Print out the log in which to look for more info
• Format the log in XML so you can read it with a tool like a normal human
• Collect all the failed logs (I know that PSS must have done this a hundred times) and point out what the failings were and if/how you solved the problem

I know that printing out stuff like stack traces are totally useless, but printing out error messages as bland as the above one is also useless. Tell us where to look! Hopefully, posts like this one will help just in that it populates the search engines with more information. Other than that, the update is running great!

D