A Checksum Head-scratcher
Joe M posted in Home Support on April 25th, 2010
I have a ‘high maintenance’ friend that constantly needs help with their computer.
About every 4 months, they manage to get some sort of unknown malignancy.
It happened again.
So, for a ’small fee’ I am re-installing Windows XP on their machine.
I went through the regular gyrations, the list of things that I normally install.
Everything seemed to be going fine…
I did notice an oddity I have never experienced before.
Deep into the installation, I kept getting errors… checksum and corrupt files.
The errors occurred after downloading files from a browser.
I did a great deal of research.
Using google as my main tool, I found the problem was described…
But I never could find a descriptive solution.
I finally stumbled across a reference to a similar problem.
The solution suggested was to use the validation for Windows Genuine Advantage.
I tried it.
I was in a weird situation.
I had to update Internet Explorer to use WGA, but the errors would not let me update.
Catch 22!
An extra two hours out…
I finally decided to use a restore point, (that was just after the fresh install) and install all of the Windows Updates, and ensure that WGA was in the list.
After about another 45 minutes out of the way…
I had Windows Updates functioning.
After a reboot…
Downloads were functioning… and the file corruption and checksum errors were gone.
Looks like the culprit was a corruption with something dealing with WGA and the download process.
Got to love Windows Genuine Advantage.