Trust Your Hunches or You May Be Sorry

[abajan]

A few hours ago some thunderstorms were approaching my area and I decided to shut down my (Windows XP Professional SP2) computer because in the past power surges caused by lightning had damaged various components, requiring costly repairs.

Anyway, when I went to shut down the computer, I noticed that the “Turn Off Computer” dialog box looked different (see attached image). To play it safe, I decided to click the link that would turn off the computer without installing the updates because I had a hunch that something bad might happen if I clicked the regular “Turn Off” button. I figured that there was no rush to install these so called “important” updates. I decided to wait for the thunderstorms to pass, boot up the computer, get online and Google the string “Click Turn Off to install important updates and turn off your computer” to see what happened to others who chose to have updates installed at shut down.

Well, it appears from the results that many who did that were unable to restart their computers normally if KB968389 was one of the updates. They first had to reboot into Safe Mode and remove KB968389 via “Add/Remove Software” before they could start their computers in the usual manner. So I checked my WindowsUpdate.log file (located in the C:\WINDOWS folder) to see what updates were recently downloaded and due to be installed and sure enough KB968389 was one of them!

Trust your hunches.