New mainboard - repair XP installation - IE crashes - No windows updates

After 5 years I bought a new pc. At least I bought the new components like a mainboard, cpu and ram. I really thought that it would be as simple as changing the components and hooking up the old hard drive. But I was wrong because of Windows XP...

The system always booted into a blue screen and immediately rebooted itself. This way I couldn't even figure out what the error was. But after I searched the internet I found several posts stating that after a mainboard change you have to repair or reinstall XP again.

I didn't want to install XP from scratch (who wants to do this anyway?) so I decided to repair my existing XP installation. But first I switched the hard drive back to my old system and booted normally. Then I downloaded driver cleaner to uninstall the additional hardware drivers that had been installed for the old hardware.

After that I switched the hard drive back to the new system and booted from my XP cd. I chose to repair the existing installation (that the setup fortunately managed to find on my hd) and waited for the setup process to complete praying that everything will be alright.

After the system booted up again it really looked like everything was okay. So I started Windows Update to install the updates since SP2 again. In total it was 88 MB of updates. But although all the updates had been downloaded none of the updates succeeded. I tried it several times but Windows Update always refused to install it.

The second problem with the system was that the Internet Explorer didn't work anymore. Every time I started the IE and the window appeared I entered a URL and IE spawned a new IE window and all IEs froze and had to be killed.

Then I had the idea: Before the repair of XP I had IE7 installed. But during the repair session only the IE6 dlls and settings got restored. So maybe this mixture of IE6 and IE7 was causing the problems. So I installed the IE7 again and the system was stable again: Defender could update itself again and the IE7 worked fine.

But the Windows Updates still didn't work after that. So I searched again and found some hints on MS support web which didn't help either. But on a german website I found the necessary commands to get Windows Update working again:

regsvr32 wuapi.dll

regsvr32 wuaueng.dll

regsvr32 wuaueng1.dll

regsvr32 wucltui.dll

regsvr32 wups.dll

regsvr32 wups2.dll

regsvr32 wuweb.dll

Zonealarm and VMWare Player

I always had trouble with Zonealarm and VMWare Player. The firewall just didn't let me access the internet no matter which connection type (bridged, NAT) I configured for the guest system.
But now I have found the right answer to stop this never ending story of disappointment.
Simply go to Zonealarm and open the "firewall > zones" dialog. Here you just have to add the IP address (or range) of your guest system and set its type to "secure".
This way it works... and VMWare rocks!