I read Mark Joseph Edwards and Paula Sharick’s “Service Packs and Hotfixes” (November 1998), and wanted to mention a Catch 22 regarding installing Windows NT Service Pack 4 (SP4) and NT 4.0 Option Pack 4 (OP4) on a new machine. You can’t install OP4 without having SP3 or later installed.
If you install SP4 before OP4 you will get the error Setup detected that Windows NT 4.0 SP4 or greater is installed on your machine. We haven’t tested this product on SP4. Do you wish to proceed? Microsoft’s SP4 README file says, “NOTE: It’s recommended that you reinstall SP4 after you install Windows NT Option Pack 4.0. Otherwise, an MSMQ MQIS Controller installation won’t work until the Windows NT Service Pack 4.0 is reinstalled.”
So you must do two service pack installations to install a new machine with OP4 components (e.g., Internet Information Server—–IIS—–4.0). Either of the following installation sequences works: SP3, OP4, SP4 or SP4, OP4, SP4.
I can’t wait until Microsoft comes out with 40 hotfixes for SP4 to add to the confusion. I think it’s long past time for NT 4.5.

--David Rahmel

David Rahmel 8/6/1999 2:08:24 PM