Windows broke my machine - again!

Another weekend of annoyance and pain. Windows broke my machine again.  Again I hear you say, yes again.

This time though with Ubuntu linux set up on my old machine - hooray for those 30 minutes spent installing it - I was able to source the problem to… guess what…Windows. Yes, Windows! Windows update to be more precise!! Is it a hardware compatibility issue or something else I do not know, but tonight and I may be speaking far too early I think I  cracked it - with a little help from that font of knowledge called the web!

It would not surprise me if Microsoft in its wisdom, when putting a 435MB service pack for Visual Studio, they wrecked an entire system of machines!  Not exactly a wise choice.  Lets hope this doesn't take all night to install manually! 

For anyone with huge "The instruction at…..The memory could not be read" error message followed by a 'Generic Host Process for Win32 Services had encountered a problem and needs to close.', the details of which point to an issue in the msi.dll, look here and follow the quick steps in the bottom of the post!