[dneyder]

I am trying to help a friend who's even more clued out than I am when it comes to tech stuff. She kept getting an error that service pack 2 needed to be reinstalled, so I went ahead and uninstalled it from her pc and rebooted, and automatic updates began the installation. Then and error appeared (not verbatim): cannot copy file cleanmgr please specify a location for this file.

I then canceled the install. What's happening? How should I proceed?

[Elvandil]

If your luck is good, that may be the only error you get. Try directing it to C:\Windows\system32 or C:\Windows for the file.

[dneyder]

After this and other attempts failed, I copied to a cd the file from another comuputer and it could not be seen by the one failing the install. Renaming the file to any other name causes it to appear. It ca see a zipped cleanmgr.zip too, but claims the zip file is currupt when extracting. Seems to be some reason it refuses to acknowldedge that cleanmgr.exe can exist!

WTF?

[Rich-M]

Run checkdisk on the hard drive, then try again.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315265

[dneyder]

Same problem. Let me add before anyone suggests it that I did disable virus protection during the service pack install attempt.... Still completely at a loss here.