Windows Update Page is Blank in IE on XP SP3

Here's a new one I've never seen until last week. Latest and greatest IE8, XP SP3 with all the trimmings (all fixes) and when you visit http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com - you get a blank (white) page that doesn't appear to load anything. If you view the source, you'll see that there's a whole page there telling you that either your browser doesn't support active x or it is not allowing active x content. Smooth move there MS, way to test your shit!

If you visit http://update.microsoft.com/ - the page loads, but you see an error message telling you:

"Files required to use Windows Update are no longer registered or installed on your computer. To continue:

Click option 1: Register or reinstall the files for me now (Recommended)
Click option 2: Let me read about more steps that might be required to solve the problem."

Clicking option 1 may fix the problem, but this is doubtful. Ignore option 2 as it does not contain ANY relevant information for fixing the problem. The problem is that for some reason, a bunch of the DLL's required by windows to run windows update have become unregistered. What you'll need to do:

1) Start -> Run -> cmd (to open a command window)
2) type: regsvr32 wuapi.dll [enter]
3) type: regsvr32 wups.dll [enter]
4) type: regsvr32 wuaueng.dll [enter]
5) type: regsvr32 wucltui.dll [enter]
6) type: regsvr32 atl.dll [enter]
7) type: regsvr32 msxml3.dll [enter]

After every time you hit enter, you should see a window that pops up and tells you that the DLL has been successfully registered. When you're done with registering the last DLL, go back to the updates page in IE and click on option 1 - let windows do its thing. When it's done, you should be able to visit either updates.microcrosoft.com or windowsupdate.microsoft.com without a problem.

And now, a big round of applause to MS for creating an error message page that their browser won't display. Good work fellas! Way to test and maintain your products. Helluva job... really!

Thunderbird Error: Dovecot/Postfix

"The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: error"

This is the error that Thunderbird 2 [2.0.0.23] reported when I tried to check my email this morning. Did some digging and found that the problem is with the mbox format on the server. Some tweaking yesterday for mail server migration must have messed this one up. I tailed /var/log/maillog on the mail server and watched for errors. I saw:

File isn't in mbox format: /var/mail/username

Edited /var/spool/mail/username and got rid of 2 garbage lines at the top of the file. Restarted postfix and dovecot for good measure and fired Thunderbird back up. No more errors and it looks like all my email is there.