And please, no advice to get a Mac. It’s not helpful, and some of my clients require that I have a Windows machine.

I don’t seem to be able to update. When I look through my update history, in fact, I can see a large number of failed updates, going back a year or two. There are no instructions as to what to do about this at the Windows update site. Also, I’m getting a message that I have ActiveX disabled, so that the Windows Update site can’t “display” properly. How did I do this, and how do I undo it? Or should I? Is that causing my problems?

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that in my IE Security Options, the only thing disabled for ActiveX is downloading unsigned objects. Surely that can’t be the problem on a Microsoft website? I should also add that the specific thing that it’s trying and failing to install (at least for now) is Microsoft Installer 3.1 (something that another web site told me that I had to uninstall in order to avoid a different error message).

[Update about 6 PM EST]

FWIW, I just downloaded and ran Microsoft’s beta version of their new anti-spyware software, and it found no problems…

[Saturday morning update]

Oops, spoke too soon. Overnight it did discover MyDoom and Netsky on the machine. I’ve removed them, but I still can’t do the update.

[Saturday afternoon update]

Well, I never really figured out why it won’t do updates, but I spent a couple hours doing manual updates for about a year’s worth of security upgrades, and all seemed to go well, except for one, called “.NET Framework 1.1” for which it wants to install a service pack. Unfortunately, it’s a catch-22ish sort of thing, because whenever I try to install the thing, it tells me that I have to have .NET Framework 1.1 installed. When I try to install that, it bombs out.

So I don’t know if this is a problem or not, but it’s the only thing that Microsoft wants to upgrade that can’t be now.