How to manually install the various pieces of Update Rollup 2 for Media Center 2005

I have previously written about a couple of instances where Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 setup can fail because other Windows hotfixes have been installed in such a way that they interfere with the hotfixes that Update Rollup 2 tries to install. Those cases and steps to workaround them are described here and here.

A few customers who have run into one of these issues have been unable to use the recommended workarounds because the conflicting hotfix fails to uninstall correctly. This can happen due to uninstall bugs in the other hotfixes or in cases where the other hotfixes were installed with a command line switch that intentionally prevents it from being uninstalled.

If you are unable to install Update Rollup 2 due to a conflicting hotfix that cannot be uninstalled, you can use the following steps to extract the individual pieces of Update Rollup 2 setup and install them individually to workaround this problem. 

NOTE: These steps should only be used as a last resort, so please make sure to try the other workarounds that I have documented before trying these steps.

  1. Download the setup package for Update Rollup 2 and save it to your local hard drive
  2. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
  3. Change directories to the folder that you saved the Update Rollup 2 setup package to in step 1 by typing cd /d <directory> (you will need to replace <directory> in this command with the actual path that you saved the Update Rollup 2 setup package to in step 1, for example - cd /d c:\downloads)
  4. Run WindowsXPMediaCenter2005-KB900325-usa.exe /x:c:\temp to extract the contents to a temporary folder
  5. Type cd /d c:\temp\bin to change to the directory you extracted the Update Rollup 2 setup package to in step 4 above
  6. Run WindowsMedia10-KB895572-x86.exe /norestart (this may fail due to this issue; if it does, ignore the failure and continue on to the next package)
  7. Run WindowsXP-KB891593-x86.exe /norestart (this may fail due to this issue; if it does, ignore the failure and continue on to the next package)
  8. Run WindowsXP-KB895961-x86.exe /norestart
  9. Run WindowsXP-KB899337-v2-x86.exe /norestart (this may fail due to this issue; if it does, ignore the failure and continue on to the next package)
  10. Run WindowsXP-KB899510-x86.exe /norestart
  11. Run WindowsXP-KB888795-x86.exe /norestart
  12. Run WindowsXP-KB902841-x86.exe /norestart
  13. Run KB900325.exe /norestart
  14. Run wmfdist95.exe /Q:A /R:N /c:"wmsetsdk.exe /WMFDIST /Q /R:N /DisallowSystemRestore"
  15. Reboot your system