SBS 2003 SP2 installations

Service pack 2 almost has Susan’s seal of  approval. It’s a great post that talks a lot of common sense about any major patch/service pack installation.

Plan it….think about what your doing and don’t blindly install without at the very least having some sort of backup!

If you follow the process in Susan’s post you should be fine

To date i’ve only installed one SP2

The installation went fine and without any major issue

It wasn’t until this morning that i realised i hadn’t checked to see if i’d been effected by the Help and support issue

I checked and…and it wouldn’t start

Windows cannot open Help and Support because a system service is not running. To fix this problem, start the service named ‘Help and Support’ 

This support article offers a hotfix and a workaround

I decided to use the workaround
WORKAROUND
To work around this issue, you must reinstall the “Help and Support” service. To do this, follow these steps:1. Close all applications that use HelpCtr Service. 
2. At a command prompt, type the following commands, and then press ENTER after each command:

• %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\HelpSvc.exe /regserver /svchost netsvcs /RAInstall
• %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\HSCUpd.exe -i %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\hscmui.cab
• %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\HSCUpd.exe -i %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\hscsp_*3.cab

I couldn’t get the last command to work

“Installing package: C:\WINDOWS\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\hscsp_*3.cab …
Error (hr = 8007007b): The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.”

Then i noticed a quote mark at the start of the command so tried a couple of strategically placed quotes of my own but it wasn’t having any of it

So i opened up the %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries directory to have a look

I spotted the hscsp_l3.cab so modified the command to include the L

• %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\HSCUpd.exe -i %windir%\pchealth\helpctr\binaries\hscsp_l3.cab

This worked fine and help and support started working again

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Andy Parkes

Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. Formerly, coordinator of AMITPRO and Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

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