Last night I recently installed XP SP3 onto my laptop. All seemed fine until the reboot, when the USB safe eject icon did no display in the system tray, no network connections shown, and the device manager was empty. Had to spend hours tacking the problem which was eventually resolved on the Technet forum. There was a solution that needed tech savvy and even some the Technet members had difficulty. The common factor was identified as Norton Security products.

It would appear that installing SP3 causes corruptions in a number of registry keys, particularly in those relevant to Norton security products. If encountering this problem try the following actions, it worked for me;

1 Uninstall the Norton product, use the Norton removal tool available from the Norton web site.

2 Reboot, the missing components should have returned, and reinstall the Norton product

This is a bit of a pain in the neck but would appear to resolve the issue.

Who is to blame? There is some debate about this. Did Microsoft not QA this release properly (situation normal here then). Considering the checkered history of Norton tools running on Windows machines, I would have thought that with Microsoft would have ensured their QA suite would account for it. Obviously not.  Or is it a Symantec problem, if a third-party add-on has critical bugs that damage a system, what can Microsoft do about it, without provoking enormous problems?

As this was a Microsoft update it should be Microsoft who check for problems, it was their update release that caused the problem.