XP Service Pack 3 issues

[Alan]

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.

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.