KB5077181 was released about a month ago as part of the February Patch Tuesday rollout. When the update first arrived, users reported a wide range of problems, including boot loops, login errors, and installation issues.
Microsoft has now acknowledged another problem linked to the same update. Some affected users see the message “C:\ is not accessible – Access denied” when trying to open the system drive.
Reputation is such a strange phenomenon. XP was considered a disaster at launch. It took them years to repair everything that didn’t work.
The rollout of 64 bit architecture support was so sloppy that people were holding on to old hardware so as to not have to install the x64 version of XP. The premiere of the NT kernel meant that nothing had drivers, most software wasn’t compatible yet. DirectX 9 broke half of old games compatibility. There were also two entirely different versions of the shell with dramatically different start menus. Some versions didn’t support multi core CPUs.
Not to mention that XP actually spans three different OSs. Upgrades were just a reinstall wizard of the OS.
It wasn’t until the end life of XP and the launch of Vista that people started to cling to XP SP2 and its reputation switched due to a mix of nostalgia and fear of the much worse launch of Vista.