It's dark in here, isn't it?

Well, not really.  But it might have been.

Despite all the fears to the contrary, I have a working system.  Took the plunge and loaded SP1 onto the main workstation's Vista.

I know, I wasn't going to do it unless forced.  But I got bored, and there's nothing like living dangerously.  Also, it seemed best to try this out on a non-critical device first.  My flush of success in re-animating the laptop, for however brief a period it might turn out to be, gave me confidence to go ahead on the desktop system.  After all, if it all went to pot, I'd at least have the laptop to fall back on and be able to access Internet resources to see who to blame.

But against all expectation, the process was smooth as anything, albeit a bit slow.  I hate to think how long this would take on a lesser machine - this isn't the greatest box ever built, but with a quad core processor, enough RAM to sink a 32 bit OS, and RAID disks it's quicker than most.  Yet it still seemed to take an age to complete the download, then the install, then the three-stage reboot.  But I have that coveted little addition on my system properties page now - SP1.