Having just tried a couple times to install Sp3 and having still received this error–one that frighteningly hasn’t been resolved yet in Sp3–I thought I’d post a quick guide on how to get around this problem using some wicked voodoo The information contained in this guide was taken from here.
If there are any previous installations of either beta or release candidate versions of Sp3, then you must uninstall them before installing the final version.
Download and install subinact.exe.
Open Notepad (Start Menu-All Programs-Accessories-Notepad) and copy and paste the text below into the new Notepad document:
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CURRENT_USER /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %SystemDrive% /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
subinacl /subdirectories %windir%*.* /grant=administrators=f /grant=system=f
secedit /configure /cfg %windir%\inf\defltbase.inf /db defltbase.sdb /verbose
Save-As “reset.cmd” (yes, including the quotation marks) to C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools.
Now, Open My Computer and double-click the file you just created in C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools.
Wait for the program to finish running before continuing on (yes, it takes a while, that’s normal).
Download and install Windows XP Service Pack 3 (which, although on Microsoft’s servers, is noticeably absent from their website).
Welcome to Service Pack 3 🙂
Update: Don’t bother looking for Sp3 on Microsoft’s official website. Microsoft has pulled Sp3 for XP as well as Sp1 for Vista from their website due to
a compatibility issue between Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS) and Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1). Microsoft Dynamics RMS is a retail chain management solution for small and midsize customers.
Update: 5-16-08: Sp3 is now available through Microsoft’s Windows update as well as in their download center. It’s about time!
Memoirs and Musings of Loki-undergod 
Luki:
I was running into the Access Denied issue when installing SP3 for WinXP. I found yoru information and ran the resert.cmd file. Everything appeared well as I was successfully able to install Sp3 afterwards.
I am now encountering an issue. I develop small websites on my local machine with IIS 5.1 installed as a test server. Since the Sp3 installation I am running into 401 – access denied errors for my latest simple asp site. It is strange behavior. The access denied is happening for most images called by my style sheets as well as a small flash image called from the html code. The site still displays but without these elements. It is like the 401 is being applied to the actual elements and not the directories because. Stylesheets reside in their own directories and are being applied.
The image directorie where I store all images is being accessed because i see a couple images being displayed that are being called form the html code.
Very wierd behavior since i walked through this update. Prior to the update IIS there were no permission issues and development was going well.
Woudl you please give me some help?
Definitely a strange error, indeed, Tim! I can’t say that anything comes to mind off of the top of my head, but I will certainly look into the issue.
-Loki
Tim,
You may want to take a look at this article, which suggests to remove and reinstall IIS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/325889/en-us
As suggested in one forum:
“Before you remove IIS, please backup IIS configuration and copy to another location since you may need one of the step to remove IIS folder. This is the note copied from previous article.
The default location of the backup is the %SystemRoot%\system32\inetsrv\MetaBack folder. By default, C:\Winnt is the %SystemRoot% folder in Windows 2000 and C:\Windows is the %SystemRoot% folder in Windows XP Professional. If you want to save your backup file to another location, you can copy the file from this default location to another location. Keep a copy in the default location to allow for an easy restoration. “