Microsoft Office 2003 Updates problem

[chiefy255]

Microsoft Updates roll back my personal settings. Following a crash, I reinstalled the OS and several applications including Microsoft Office Professional 2003. I spent a long time amending the personal settings; and changing the desktop background wallpaper, folders options, start-up preferences on utilities such as Uniblue “PowerSuite”, and so on. Everything was working excellently! Then I went to Microsoft Update. There were 21 critical updates which I duly downloaded and installed. When I restarted my computer I was utterly horrified to find that all my changes had been annulled. The computer worked all right, but I was “back to square one”. Mistakenly thinking that some inadvertent act on my part had done the damage, I wiped my hard disk and repeated the whole reinstallation process, including amending personal settings. Once again, all was fine …. until I downloaded and installed the Microsoft updates!!!

I feel sure that one or more of the Microsoft updates are causing the trouble. Having reinstalled everything (for the third time!), I shall next do a “custom” Microsoft update.

Can anyone advise me which of these Microsoft updates I should avoid (i.e., uncheck in the list)?

The computer is a Packard Bell EasyNote GN45 with 1GB of RAM and a new 160GB Western Digital hard drive. The OS is Windows XP Professional (SP3).

 

[BillAllen55]

Following a crash, I reinstalled the OS and several applications including Microsoft Office Professional 2003. I spent a long time amending the personal settings; and changing the desktop background wallpaper, folders options, start-up preferences on utilities such as Uniblue “PowerSuite”, and so on. Everything was working excellently! Then I went to Microsoft Update. There were 21 critical updates which I duly downloaded and installed. When I restarted my computer I was utterly horrified to find that all my changes had been annulled. The computer worked all right, but I was “back to square one”. Mistakenly thinking that some inadvertent act on my part had done the damage, I wiped my hard disk and repeated the whole reinstallation process, including amending personal settings. Once again, all was fine …. until I downloaded and installed the Microsoft updates!!!

I can't exactly tell you why this seems to work but in my experience I have always downloaded or installed the Windows updates prior to installing anything else such as other programs. Based on your explanation as to the computers bad behavior and the fact that you attempted the same process twice with the identical results I would suggest that you do the clean format and clean install then installing the updates prior to any other program installation.
Computers can be fussy this way.
Regards.