In an earlier post, I defended Windows XP service pack 2 against the negative publicity it has gained and that opinion still stands – SP2 is a critical update with benefits far outweighing risks in today’s ever more security-conscious environment.

I also stand by my comments that SP2 should be thought of as an operating system upgrade and tested accordingly but one of the key tools that would assist the testing process is still missing. I can see no defence for the time that it is taking to ship an updated application compatibility toolkit (including the Windows application verifier) and whilst the current version (3.0) is available for download, it does not take into account the major operating system changes made in XP SP2.

In the meantime, Microsoft knowledge base article 884130 gives details of programs that are known to experience a loss of functionality when they run on a Windows XP Service Pack 2-based computer.