Can somebody help me here... please....

I recently upgraded the Windows 2000 Pro workstations here in the office to SP4 so I could apply the patch for the DCOM vulnerabilities (Blaster and others).

Since then I have had many complaints and spent many many hours researching to see what I could come up with.

The biggest and most prominent problem is the fact that many users have to wait for minutes before they get the print dialog after hitting the print option under the file menu. This is using MS Word 97, Word XP and Outlook Express 5.5 as well as most, if not all other applications they might be using.

Nothing else has been changed on these machines to cause the problem other then SP4 and the Patches for DCOM and port 135. Everything worked just fine before. The printers are located on the network and are tied in using various jetdirect (some HP, some not) modules and worked fine before on all OS's and fine after on non Windows 2000 machines. Blaster had been present on our LAN but the last trace of it (or its variants) was wiped of that f**king laptop users machine weeks ago. I have XP machines that work fine doing the same tasks as well as older Windows 98 machines.

I have searched google and google groups and have found some hints but nothing has worked or applied here.

I have read and tried MS knowledge base article 224829 regarding the Tcp1323Opts registry tweak, I have put an entry in the LMHOSTS file pointing saqamawnt to IP 10.0.0.1 (saqamawnt is our server name) as per some other information I found, and I have removed 2 sub-keys from HKLM\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\explorer\remotecomputer\namespace and still no luck.

Has anyone seen this problem related to SP4? Is there a solution (before I format and restart from scratch!) Is this Microsoft's way of trying to force a Windows XP upgrade on Windows 2000 users? Our lease on these machine is up this coming spring... I think I will be putting in a serious request to replace the machines with Macs if we continue to have problems such as Blaster and this>

Help... anyone...?


As I get ready to hit the post button I get a positive feedback from a user regarding my last attempt at fixing the problem... seems deleting those 2 keys have fixed it. I will keep you updated on this and any solutions I can verify.

Thanks for listening!
Rene