Get ready to reboot all your XP, 2003 and 2000 systems.

Surprised? Ah, remember the lavish Windows 2000 launch parties when we were all told “rebooting will be a thing of the past” and “only six (kinds) of reboots will be necessary, down from six-hundred in NT4”.

Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but my point is that this is a major inconvenience in order to fix a minor convenience that most people aren’t even aware of in a large enterprise. It just gets uglier since we are looking at a reboot of critical services when they are supposed to be up all the time and generating revenue — who wants to tell management “we had to have a maintenance window this weekend because of some picture rendering code on the console”. Well, it has to be done.

So far we believe the update changes the following registry keys:

HKLM,”SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Hotfix\KB912919″
HKLM,”SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\KB912919″

And the following files get touched:

Windows Server 2003 will replace Gdi32.dll
Windows XP will replace Gdi32.dll and Wgdi32.dll
Windows 2000 will replace Gdi32.dll and Mf3216.dll

Which makes me say…

Patch released early
safer code rolls out to disk-
  why must I reboot?

Note: Never rely on the registry keys alone for proof of a patch since someone could obviously stuff the registry…