The suspicious death of XP support

As Microsoft slowly kills off Windows XP itself -- over the protest of many users -- it's still unclear exactly when Redmond will formally cut off all support for its old OS. But one reader's experience in dealing with a series of update fiascos over the last few months suggests that XP support may actually have expired already, and u

As Microsoft slowly kills off Windows XP itself -- over the protest of many users -- it's still unclear exactly when Redmond will formally cut off all support for its old OS. But one reader's experience in dealing with a series of update fiascos over the last few months suggests that XP support may actually have expired already, and under suspicious circumstances.

"I lost my XP system near the middle of May, and it took me until the end of June to get it back," the reader wrote. "What happened was that, suddenly, all of my hardware disappeared from the Windows device manager as did my administrator privileges. I had a lot of licensed apps on my system, and the prospect of starting with a fresh install was too daunting, so I decided to recover instead. During this time, I spent over eight cumulative hours talking to Microsoft's Indian 'support technicians.' I was at least six hours into that ordeal before I finally spoke with one that had a small clue what he was talking about."

Microsoft support led the reader on a merry chase without coming close to identifying the problem. "I'd perform one repair install after another, and there'd always be something that wouldn't work. Sometimes it was Administrator privileges, sometimes it was scripting, sometimes it was the MSI installer, sometimes it was Windows updates and sometimes it was Windows activation, which would reset itself for no apparent reason. Naturally, during every step of this, I had to do detailed malware scans, and although Norton proclaimed my broken system virus free, I had my doubts. Not until I had exercised four different anti-spyware utilities and five rootkit detectors did I become fully convinced that malware was not to blame."

Microsoft wasn't the only company giving the reader a problem, though. "You might be asking, 'What about your backups? You did have recent image backups, didn't you?' I had a lot of them, but they'd been made with Acronis True Image version 11, which backs up to and from RAID arrays without a hiccup, but can't restore them. As my C: drive is a RAID 0 array, this came as a nasty surprise. I'm convinced that Acronis broke their latest release to rush Vista compatibility out the door. If my suspicion is correct, they certainly aren't alone. Some Vista capable updates don't work nearly as well with XP as their predecessors. At any rate, I've now switched to ShadowProtect, which should hopefully provide usable image backups."

Once he realized neither Microsoft nor Acronis was going to help him, the reader spent six weeks researching on his own. Ultimately he found a way using BartPE to restore an earlier True Image backup of the system. And what had caused the Windows device manager to disappear in the first place?