ie6 was loaded when I installed SP2. It worked fine and I tested system restore it worked fine as well.

The problem appears to begin upon downloading and installing SP3 updates from Micrsoft. SP3 becomes uninstallable and system restore stops working.

In my understanding, I hope I am not wrong, rstrui.exe is the system restore utility. Is there a way to verify whether this utility is not altered by installing SP3 updates?

The epilepsy issue of ie8 (I am not in love with ie8!) seems incurable, just like brain epilepsi. Yesterday I was lucky when I could log in to windrivers whithout having iexplorer freezing on me. This did not happen today, so far I would say.