I'm running an Athlon TBird 1.4ghz with 384mb SDRAM, a Western Digital Caviar, a Yamaha 4x CDRW, a Liteon DVD, and an IBM UltraStar SCSI Ultra2 LVD drive. I ...

Microsoft has a Fixit tool for Windows Update but for some reason (my guess is this is another mistake on their part) they have withdrawn the version for Windows XP.

That didn't take long. Someone found a simple trick that forces Microsoft into sending security updates to Windows XP machines. It's not a perfect fix, but it's easy enough that anyone could do it ...