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So! My obscure and frustrating Windows problem from the other week has been solved, due to the valiant efforts of someone in our second-level (or possibly even higher) support group.
Turns out that the amusingly named "NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED" key (isn't that a great name?) in the IE registry had somehow gotten zorched (perhaps by my fooling around with it), and that's the key that's used for verifying the timestamps on signatures, and so no signatures could ever be verified.
Apparently the result of this is that Windows thinks that all signed things are not merely unsigned, but corrupted, and refuses to install them even if you have the "it's okay to install unsigned things" bit set.
I imported NO LIABILITY ACCEPTED from a different machine, and then MDAC 2.7 was willing to install itself. Windows 2000 SP3 was also willing to install itself. Great! Fixed!
Of course the next time I went to Windows Update it said that there were fifteen critical updates it wanted to install, and when I said "sure go ahead" it installed five of them and failed to install ten, and wouldn't tell me anything about the cause of the failures.
I tried a couple of them by hand, and in both cases the installs gave marvelously helpful popups saying for instance
Q324380 Setup could not backup registry key
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EventLog\System\dmboot
to file C:\WINNT\$NtUninstallQ324280$\reg0003. 1314: A required
privilege is not held by the client.
A little Googling revealed that the way to fix that is to make sure that you're doing the install from an account that has the magical backup privilege. Unfortuantely I was doing the install from an account that has the magical backup privilege, so I'm back in the usual Windows Hell.
But at least it's a different problem!
At a team-building exercise the other day, we all had to answer Revealing Personal Questions like "if you could spend an hour in conversation with anyone currently living, transportation and language translation no barrier, who would you choose?". I put down Sharon Stone, but on deeper consideration since, I'm rather leaning toward Brian Eno.
No offense, Sharon.
Another question was "when will a human first set foot on Mars?". I said "two weeks".
Bonehead Comment o' the Day: Senator Arlen Specter, for whom I think I usually have a certain amount of respect (unless I'm confusing him with someone else), apparently said "Trent Lott doesn't deserve the death penalty for what he said".
Well, d'uh, Senator Specter. No one's actually suggesting that Lott should