WARNING: .NET 4 breaks XP setups

[bugmn]

Just letting out a warning to people. Story is a bit long but it's the only way I can explain why and what happened.

Last night I decided to get rid of Windows 7 and install XP. I installed everything I needed (took all freaking day). Finally one of my last pieces of software was Puzzle Agent 2 which I believe installs and requires .Net Framework 4 (maybe I downloaded it myself, don't quite remember).

After restarting I noticed my after-boot programs load really slow (mainly wireless and the little Windows Security Alerts thing). And my TrackPoint drivers no longer work and I couldn't even uninstall them, it just froze Add/Remove Programs, same if I tried uninstalling from device manager.

I tried for about 2 hours to get it fixed and wasn't able to. And besides, who knows what else might be broken.

At this point I didn't suspect .Net, I had no idea why my TrackPoint worked up until a certain restart that night and forgot what I did before.

So this morning I reinstalled XP again. And this time I manually downloaded .Net, and after it finished installing, MS Updates wanted me to restart. So I restart. Lo' and behold, TrackPoint is slow as molasses, and certain TP functions don't work (scroll wheel, etc). Boot programs (wireless, as mentioned earlier) take about 2 minutes to load even though there's no HDD or CPU activity. And control panel takes 30 seconds to load.

This time I thought OK, it's either one of the updates or .Net framework. Well, I decided to uninstall .NET first. I uninstall, restart.... everything back to normal. Stuff loads instantly, TP driver works like a charm.

anyway just sending out a warning to other XP users and those who might Google for the same issues I was having. I'm so [censored] I wasted so much time installing and reinstalling all my [censored] just because of one piece of software!

[donzoomik]

It takes a while to recompile libraries after installation or patching. Depending on your hardware it can have big performance implications.
You'll probably notice mscorsvw.exe running. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/davidnotario/ar ... 12838.aspx

[crashnburn]

I think you may be right.

Does this have similar performance hit on Windows 7?