Microsoft to recommence pushing Vista SP1 prerequisite

After a number of users reported endless-reboot problems in February after installing one of the prerequisites for Windows Service Pack (SP) 1, Microsoft pulled automatic distribution of it. As of April 8, however, Microsoft will resume pushing out that prerequisite.

On the Microsoft Update blog, Microsoft officials noted the company's plans to resume pushing Prerequisite Knowledge Base (KB) 937287, known as the Servicing Stack Update (SSU), and explained what they believe caused the glitch:

"(T)he SSU has special code to check whether there are any pending reboots or other updates to install. If it sees either of these circumstances, it prevents the install from starting. During our investigation, we discovered that there were a few unknown and rare events during the middle of the installation of the update that could cause the update to think it needed a reboot to complete the installation.If this happened, the system entered a repeating reboot loop."

The Microsoft Update team is releasing a fix on Tuesday that will install before the SP1 SSU prerequisite does, according to a blog posting from the team, which was published on April 7. Microsoft also made "additioanl changes" to the SSU installer code, so that it will require the pre-SSU update before it will install, the Microsoft Update post said.

"These two updates should now install seamlessly through Windows Update, in the proper order, so those of you with WU set to “install updates automatically” who haven’t already installed the SSU don’t have to take any further action. For those using the standalone download of SP1, the issues we encountered do not affect that method of installing at all."

Users who already successfully installed the update do not need to uninstall it or install the new version due out April 8, Microsoft officials said.