...last Thursday, a senior security analyst (not my term for him!) came in remotely and upgraded our SAV server remotely from v.8.1 to v.10.1.6, an upgrade we ultimately needed. Problem was this was done with no testing whatsoever in our environment (400 desktops, 150 laptops -- mostly remote, and 30 servers) and with no apparent backout plan. Furthermore, this so-called senior analyst had no idea of the current policies in our environment. This is a desktop environment of mixed XP Pro and W2K units, mostly the latter.

Right off the bat we had problems. The upgrade took place during business hours, late in the afternoon. The next morning, users started reporting problems their AV wasn't updating. It soon became obvious they were still on 8.1 and that a reboot was necessary to complete the upgrade to 10.1.6. When users rebooted to complete the upgrade, then the fun really started. About 60% of the users rebooted and the new version ran OK, reporting to the SAV server. The other 40%, well, I could probably write a book on all the problems we've had.

We've lost close to 20 W2K units right off the bat to some kind of video driver corruption. This driver corruption manifested itself in 2 ways: one, booting to a black screen with some speckled colored lines, and two, a "rolling reboot" (continual reboot). In both cases, we are able to boot into safe mode. The first corruption was easily fixed by uninstalling the video drivers (one an Intel 82815, the other an SMS driver), then reinstalling the driver only (not in the setup mode) from our software server. The rolling reboots are another story. We've tried removing drivers and reinstalling, then they might boot up fine, then they go back into the rolling reboot next time the unit's rebooted. Other times, it doesn't matter if we reinstall the vid driver. I've tried the chipset driver on a couple of units to no avail. I've tried numerous SAV uninstalls (tomorrow I'm going to try uninstalling with a forklift...I'll let you know how that one goes!) and reinstalls. Today, we had a W2K unit that had been rebooted successfully and happily ran SAV 10.1.6 for several days suddenly slip into the rolling reboot mode. I re-imaged the machine after a data and profile backup, it ran fine, went thru reinstalling printers (we've got dozens!), made the guy a local admin so he could do some stuff, only to have it slide into the rolling reboot when we restarted the PC. This is bizarre. This is taking place in all different dept's, with ass't app loads. Other W2K units run fine with the same app loads. We've had no hardware problems from these machines previously.

On top of this mystery W2K issue, the 10.1.6 push just didn't fully take on about 40% of working units. SAV services set to "Automatic" don't start on bootup, but if I go into console, I can start them with no problem for the user. Other units are still running 8.1, but that service may or may not be started.

In the meantime, day-to-day support has gone to hell in a handbasket, with users having no idea what we're going thru as staff and expecting normal levels of support.

Anybody here been thru or seen anything like this? This is about the most bizarre network/computer problem I've ever seen.

Ugh, life in Hell starts up again in 3 hours.

**sigh**