As if by Magic.

I was recently contacted by Dwight Bittner in Alberta as a result of the tour and my blog postings about a challenge he had. I wanted to share this with you as an example, not only of how useful I am told having a Microsoft Techie talking to you all is, but about how we can all help each other, by sharing our challenges and solutions:

Dwight took the time to document the challenge and Email me with the solution:

Yesterday afternoon one of my colleagues was installing the SMS 2.0 console on a workstation for one of our new helpdesk employees.

Under Windows XP Professional one of the ways that you can make the SMS console work by enabling a local security policy on the workstation.

The local security option that was enabled was Network access: Let Everyone permissions apply to anonymous users. (see screen shot below)

Another challenge that we came across was that the Windows File Protection system notified me that some files versions were incorrect and needed to be restored. However, we had installed Windows XP SP2 and it was these files that were required to correctly repair the system.

The error message screen shots are shown below:

The process by which I resolved the problem based on discussions with you is detailed below.

After extracting SP2 I created a SP2 folder within the C:\I386 directory.

I then copied the files that were extracted from WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe to the C:\I386\SP2 folder.

I then added C:\I386\SP2 to the Installation Sources and ServicePackSourcePath registry keys located at

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup (see screen shot below)

I then tested to see if the registry changes would take effect simply by pressing the Retry button on the Windows File Protection window.

However, the error message remained on the screen.

I then logged off and then logged back onto the workstation and the error message displayed itself again.

Finally, I restarted the computer and everything was fine.

All Credit to Dwight!