Uninstalling XP SP2

I have sveral machines that have XP installed from a slipstreamed CD incorporating SP2.

Is there anyway I can get rid of SP2, it is causing me some major headaches.

Ta

 

I have not tested slipstreaming yet, so I really dont' know.

In Control Panel \ Uninstall software, can you NOT uninstall SP2 from here ?

What kind of headaches are you experiencing?

 

SP2 isnt listed in the control panel, neither is there a hidden unistall folder in C: drive.

The problems are printer issues - very slow printing with the latest HP drivers, and frequent crashes when our users are in Word. We use lotus notes which interacts with word to create documents and the SP2 machines and unreliable to say the least.

It doesnt happen with all of them and there is no consistency in hardware to find out what is causing it all. The only similarity is SP2. I have moved the problem printers to older drivers, but they now print a little slower becasue of that, although they are useable.

There are probably only 6 machines out of 40 affected, but I have yet to move another 40 over from Win 2000, something I am reluctant to do and the users affected are getting very impatient with me as their machines always seem to crash just as they try and save hours of work. They are lawyers and time is very definitely money for them.

To put the rest of the machines onto SP1 means creating several new Ghost images, i.e lots more work, so I wondered if it were possible to just remove SP2 from the problem machines.

 

Is there nothing being listed in Event Viewer or Dr. Watson ?

Are the printers Network enabled..ie equipted with HP print servers and connected via ethernet, or are they parallel shared off workstations?

 

Grunty--As far as uninstalling SP2, look here
http://www.compphix.com/uninstallingsp2.html
(24jedi meant Control Panel|Add/Remove Programs in the first post.)
But rather than uninstalling SP2, which OS has advantages, perhaps you should first try to "tone up" the PC's and SP2 itself.
I do not know how often you do the following, but if you have not done them for a while, they will help speed up a PC.
1) IE Tools|Internet Options|General tab|Delete Files
2) Run Chkdsk . My Computer|Right click on main drive (probably C:\)|Properties|Tools tab|Error Checking|Check Now.
3) Perhaps Defragment. My Computer|Right click on main drive (probably C:\)|Properties|Tools tab|Defragmentation|Defrag Now|Analyze. See if Defragmentation is advised. If not, do not Defrag.
4) Start|Run|type sfc /scannow|OK. You probably will be asked for the Win XP CD, so have it ready. This step makes sure system files are not corrupt.
Are the PC's and peripherals running any better?
You could also consider
5) Scan with antivirus and spyware detector programs. The latter category would include AdAware and Spybot S&D. And be sure you have the latest updated virus definitions and reference files respectively.
AdAware
http://www.lavasoft.de/support/download/
SpybotS&D
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

 

Thanks for the replies.

The problem machines have all just been rebuilt from scratch, some are brand new Dell optiplex's so defrag and scanning are probably not necessary. I have also rebuilt the user's roaming profiles to clear out any problems there.

This also discounts any adware/spyware problem as crashes have happened within minutes of the computers being setup at the user's desk.

Our AV software is McAfee and is updated every day from a central server.

At the moment I am concentrating on one particular machine that seems worse than all the others (brand new dell, rebuilt yesterday afternoon) The event log shows that Winword crashed out but doesnt tell me why. I am running Dr Watson to see if it will tell me anything, but I must confess I have never used Dr Watson before and am not familiar with it.