>I am hoping someone can help me with this problem. I recently put together a new PC and installed winXP home SP2 from an original disk. Then went to windows update and got a list of the needed updates (over 80 of them). But because I only had a dialup connection available at the time, I went to a different computer (at work) to actually d/l the updates via a high speed connection. I then brought them home and did the install manually. Everything seemed to go fine except now that there are more new updates, the automatic download and install fails on the install. This is probably because the original updates were installed in the wrong order, but how can we tell what is the proper order and how do we fix it now?

One of the first things that gets installed on a non-updated copy of XP SP2 is Windows Installer 3.1. If that hasn't been done yet it could affect everything else:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/893803