I haven't been able to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1.

There.  I said it.  I've had access to the SP1 "release bits" for ages as you might suspect and I haven't been able to install it on my production machine and I've been incredibly bitter about it because my coworkers drool over the improvements that we've made to Windows Vista with SP1's availability:

• Improved file copy speed
  (Incidentally, using the cmd netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled works VERY well now for network routers that can't handle Vista's dynamic TCP window throttling)
• Fewer User Access Control dialog boxes
• Better DirectX support (support for DirectX 9 & 10 hardware)
• Improved power efficiency
• Improved security

Because I've been able to install Windows Vista Service pack 1 on two other non-critical systems of mine, I literally seeth when I hear about malcontents complaining about SP1 "not being good enough" because dammit, at least you got to install it on your production machine - I haven't even gotten that far.

Yessir, when I attempt the install, after the progress bar takes 1 hour to crawl across the entire dialog dialog box, I get an error that reads:

 
WTF? 

Sigh.  Whatever happened to striving for meaningful error messages?  Could it not find a file or registry entry?  Could it not write to the disk due to some sort of corruption?  What does this mean?  <entering forensics mode>

So if you go to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=101139 like it says (which incidentally isn't hyperlink-enabled, meaning that on top of being inconvenienced by not being able to install the Service Pack, now you have to manually type in some long string of characters in to a Address/URL box in your browser.  Grrr. Why do we have Internet Explorer as an integrated part of the operating system if the Operating System dialog boxes aren't going to be hyperlink-enabled?  Note-to-self:  Escalate with Core team.) the link takes you to a page that go through a set or purported resolutions:

1) "Run Windows Update to reset the installation of the Service Pack in the event that it was caused by a previously incomplete 'update installation'." 
First of all - that's highly unlikely and I hardly have any confidence that that's going to work.  Sure enough, I retry running Windows Update and it does nothing.  So much for that.

2) "Check your hard disk for errors."
Okay.  That could be it.  Errors on the hard drive.  I've had my share of driver related blue screens (something's wrong with my Compaq nc8430's power management electronics resulting in a rare bugcheck screen that strikes at weird times)  So I run a Chkdsk/Scan for Errors against the System Partition... the only partition I have.  Nope.  Passes with flying colors.

3) "Run Check System Update Readiness (CheckSUR)"
This is new.  For those that haven't seen this, this tool essentially goes through and validates that the file backups that Windows maintains in it's manifests of "repair files" are consistent and uncorrupted.  (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109180)

It also instructs me to:

• Type reg add HKLM\COMPONENTS /v StoreCorruptTimeStamp /t REG_SZ /d "0" /f, and then press ENTER. 
• Type reg delete HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\CheckSUR\, and then press ENTER. 
• Download and install http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109180

This does indeed find some problems.  19 to be exact.  So I try the install of Service Pack 1 again.  It actually gets farther, but once again, no joy.  But at least it did something.

4) Run the Windows Vista Memory Diagnostic Tool.
Alright - didn't expect this either.  Let's check the memory for failures.

Annnnnd nothing.  Passes with flying colors.

5) "Run the System File Checker tool."
This I hadn't tried as well.  Run SFC /scannow.  And this is what I get.

"Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation."

Now, this I spent quite a while on because apparently MANY other people on the Internet have run into this problem - but not as a result of discovering that Service Pack 1 failed. 

So I proceeded to figure out why System File Checker had failed and how to get it working, and here's what turned up:

• You can analyze the SFC log file, here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928228/en-us.
  This didn't do me much good other that to tell me that there's some serious corruption in Windows and apparently the tool that's supposed to fix it (SFC) can't deal with it.
• Run a Vista startup repair. This can repair more than just startup problems http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/91467-startup-repair.html
  This ended up doing nothing.

6) Restart the computer, close all apps, disable antivirus/antispyware, and try again.
Are you kidding me?  The ol' "Reboot your computer" routine?  Like I didn't try that in the beginning. <smirk>

--------------------

So there you have it:  That's as far as I was able to get in attempting to repair my system.  For IT techs everywhere, you know that there's just one last way to fix a Windows Vista computer and that's the method of last resort:

7) Do a Vista upgrade repair reinstall.
This gives you a new OS without changing settings, files, folders, other programs and the like. http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/88236-repair-install-vista.html

I really didn't want to have to do this because:

• It means having to test all my apps and all my devices to ensure everything in the way of programs, settings, and data "carried over" from the previous installation.
• It takes a verrrrrrry long time.  The installation may take as long as 2 hours as it backs up your settings, reinstalls, and restores your settings.

But the good news is that once I backed up all my data and did the repair reinstall, everything worked cleanly.  (Except for my Zune which required that I reinstall the Zune client software on my PC)