Ok will try. Thanks a lot. =)
Hello, horcruxes.
I revisited your problem.
Microcode or microprogramming is like designing a "firmware" for microcontroller (MCU) or in this case, Intel CPU Pentium Prescott. There is a small size of programmable grid arrays (PGA) in Intel CPU Pentium Prescott. This "small" software (low-level coding), is emulating certain hardware functionality. Why Intel decided to create a microcode to emulate CPU hardware-level functionality is beyond my limited knowledge.
It seems that this microcode is unstable, maybe due to excessive heat which causing the memory area that stores this microcode to accidentally erase the microcode. That is why your crash reports keep showing
bucket error. The memory area is quite volatile. Or, the way the user programs are using this microcode memory is triggering the crash.
Microcode updates are not stored permanently within the processor; they vanish when the power is cut, so every boot has to re-assert them.
....
If you have a Celeron with 256k Level 2 cache, or a Pentium 4 with over 1M of Level 2 cache, you have a processor that may be at risk. In addition to this, if the revision level is less than 8 (in some cases 7; typically it will be 0) then you are definitely at risk.
.....
How do I get out alive?
There are two ways; one that allows you to uninstall SP2 and carry on as if nothing had happened, and another that lets you keep SP2, with one file out of use.
Disable Level 1 and Level 2 cache in CMOS
This will leave the system running so slowly, you will often think it's crashed! Have faith; XP will load fine, and you will be able to go to Start, Settings, Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs and uninstall Service Pack 2 from there.
Expect this to take some hours; when it's done, shut down the PC. On the next boot, go back into CMOS setup (the magic keys to do that vary between PCs; Del, Ctl+Alt+Esc, Ctl+Alt+S, F1, F2 and F10 are good guesses), find your way to where you disabled the Level 1 and 2 cache last time, enable these again, save settings and quit.
This is exactly what I did (thanks Cari for the tip!) and it worked fine.
Rename away Update.sys
For best results, keep a copy of your old pre-SP2 Update.sys somewhere else before you install SP2. To find the file, navigate Windows Explorer into your Windows base directory (typically C:\Windows), then into System32, then into Drivers. You may have to change settings so that Windows Explorer actually shows you these things!
After you install SP2, and the system can't boot Windows anymore, etc. then fire up your maintenance OS, find the Update.sys file as described, and rename it away. If you kept the old pre-SP2 copy, then copy that back in as Update.sys - that is currently how I'm running my test PC, and time will tell how well this works.
Note: Running XP, perhaps especially with SP2, with Prescott that isn't microcode-updated to revision 8 or better, is not the ideal situation. You really should update BIOS so that it updates the Prescott processor properly, for the definitive fix!
http://cquirke.mvps.org/sp2intel.htmThe problem of instability occurs with Windows XP SP2.
I suggest you to update to Windows XP SP3 to alleviate the problem as I see you use Windows XP SP2 as evident in your crash reports.