I have heard from many customers over the past months who have had issues installing Update Rollup 2 for Windows XP Media Center 2005 because of a conflict with Windows XP hotfix KB904706.  I previously posted a workaround that requires you to uinstall KB904706 and then attempt to install Update Rollup 2 again.

In a few cases, this workaround does not help because KB904706 was installed with the command line switch that causes the remove button in Add/Remove Programs to be suppressed.  If you find yourself in this situation and cannot remove KB904706, the following steps will hopefully help:

Restore the remove option in Add/Remove Programs for KB904706

1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd
2. Run the command reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Hotfix\KB904706" /f
3. Run the command reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\KB904706" /f
4. Run the command reg delete "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\KB904706" /f
5. Re-install KB904706 by downloading and running it from this location

The above steps should cause the Remove button to be available again in Add/Remove Programs.  Then you can uninstall KB904706 and try to install Update Rollup 2 again using these steps.

Manually rename KB904706 files

I have seen a couple of cases where even the above steps do not solve the Update Rollup 2 installation issues.  If this happens in your scenario, please try to manually rename the files %windir%\system32\dllcache\quartz.dll and %windir%\system32\quartz.dll and then run Update Rollup 2 setup one more time.

Manually install the pieces of Update Rollup 2

If the manual renaming does not work either, please try to use the manual install steps for the Update Rollup 2 prerequisites.

If nothing else works

If all else fails, please contact me and I will try to help figure something out.