I'm helping an acquaintance with his virus-infested PC. Unfortunately, he feels he needs to continue using a particular web-design service that requires a .EXE program to be run, or otherwise we'd just go Ubuntu on it.

So.. I've wiped the hard drive clean, and reinstalled Win XP-Home (sp2) from CD, and then gone to MS to download/install sp3. At this point, the machine is supposed to be able to access "Windows Update" to get further fixes.

But the Windows Update website keeps redirecting us back to the "please install sp3" site, despite having done so twice already (and rebooted etc..).

Anybody know the fix?
Thanks.