Re: "MS screwed it up in a way which requires manual intervention"
Nobody cripples their own Windows 7 machine, the Windows Update process does it all by itself.
If you install SP1 on a newly formatted hard drive and then run Windows Update once to get up to date, it can end up in a useless state where it can take days to check for updates. You cannot blame this on the user, this entirely MS' fault.
The solution as given in the link above is to force feed it a certain list of manually-downloaded KBs in a certain order while it is not connected to the Internet and then, lo and behold, it works again.
So that was hours of my time wasted because MS doesn't do basic QA any more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
