Windows XP pro upgrade: ridiculously horrible

[Undertoad]

OK, I bought XP Pro upgrade version a few days ago, and now I have learned my lesson.

In attempting to upgrade a WinME box, the XP upgrade install behaved differently in the several times I attempted it.

At first it got partway through and died with some sort of talkback error after a "dynamic update" - intended, I guess, to correct whatever bugs MS felt necessary to correct after the OS went "gold". It suggested going again with another dynamic update.

The second time it claimed that it couldn't load a file on the CD, and failed with a bizarre error message, claiming that "upgrade functionality is disabled". The support page suggested copying the files from the CD to the hard drive and running setup from there. OK....

The third time it died with errors in user.exe.

The fourth time it got partly installed, after 30 dialogue boxes saying that it could not continue, along with only the OK button (i.e., no "cancel" - just like the examples in the user interface hall of shame). After hitting OK enough times, it appeared to resume the install, and died about 10 minutes in with a different error, after self-rebooting.

Now, it appears to be partly installed and in a state that it can't correct. On reboot, its boot manager gives a choice of booting XP or stopping the setup process. Choose to stop and it attempts an XP uninstall. But after 5 minutes of clunking away, theoretically uninstalling, it stops with a BSOD in "setupdd.sys".

It turns out that it would be cheaper to get by configuring an extra-cheap box from a system vendor and get the OS pre-installed. But please. Is nobody to upgrade? Is it not part of the MS revenue stream to see plenty of people putting up the latest and greatest?

And this box isn't anything non-standard, hardware wise. It's a P3-750 with 256 megs of memory, a Voodoo 3, two ide drives, a CDR, and a CDRW. And now it can't do anything, forever stuck halfway through the install.

Insanely, ridiculously horrible.