Vista hangs (reboot loop) installing update 3 of 3

I had this happen recently (10/20/09). I could not tell what the problem was, nor could I tell what update was failing. I tried safemode boot, last known good config, and repair, none worked.

To resolve this I booted off the Vista installation media, and selected repair. It tried to automatically repair startup configuration, and then came back saying it could not. One of the options was to go into advanced repair options. Chose that. Then chose command prompt. At command prompt:
>cd c:
>cd windows
>cd winsxs
>del pending.xml

Once the file was deleted, rebooted system. System went back to installing update 3 of 3 but this time it worked.

HP's Vista systems and problems with their bundled crapware

It appears that some of the bundled crapware on HP Vista systems can cause a problem for some systems. In particular, individuals may get a pop-up blank window saying 'navigation cancelled' and having the time and date in the title bar.

The above error comes from a scheduled task for 'Internet Services offer'.

To stop this from happening go to Start>Control Panel>(here you may need to select to show classic view)>Administrative Tools>Task Scheduler. If you highlight Task Scheduler Library on the left, in the upper right you should see some tasks (possibly these):

ExtendedServicePlan
HP Health Check
ServicePlan

Right click the tasks and chose disable.

I believe one of the tasks listed above triggers the problem (two of the three are scheduled to run every 30 minutes).

Something else I found mentions it being related to one (or both) of these processes (.exes)

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\SDP\RemEngine.exe

C:\Program Files\Hewlett-Packard\SDP\hpsdpapp.exe

I'm fairly sure if you disable the three processes (or which ever one's you have) listed above, that window will stop popping up. But I am not positive (I only had the system I was working on for a while). I'm pretty sure I had the system up for well over a half hour after disabling the scheduled tasks mentioned above, and I did not get the pop-up window.

If you do get the pop-up window, and want to get it off the screen (since it does not have the option to close it), click the window once and then hit ALT and F4. Alt + F4 close the active window.

Video problems waking from sleep

I have two computers running Vista Ultimate that have exhibited a problem when waking from standby. After logging on, the screen goes black and stays black, or you get a colored screen (bluish green) and diagonal lines moving around. In one case (Nvidia) I got this problem after installing a newer driver. Doing a driver rollback fixed it. In the other case, a laptop with a ATI 1150 card, doing a driver update fixed the problem.