so december has been the update month for a good chunk of the technology that i use:

new Zune update (meh, it could have been better)
new Visual Studio (rocks)
Office 2k7 updated later than usual (update failed, btw. I'll have to reinstall O2k7. nice.)
new DNN version (pretty cool)
Stepped up to Flash CS3 (awesomeness)

And then along comes Vista SP1.
I've not really hung on the edge of my seat for this one, simply because the laptop that I use for development has been running superbly on Vista Ultimate with very few issues. But I still believe in grabbing the service packs when they come around and this iteration was no different.
And boom. It doesn't work. Now mind you, because it doesn't install correctly automatically means that I want it more. Now I MUST have it. But sometimes its hard being Microsoft's biggest fanboy:

And guess where that link takes you? Thats right...no where meaningful for the error I've received. It simply dumps you back to the home page for Microsoft support. 
grrrr. 
so ultimately I may have to restage the box to get the new sp1. That sounds worse than it actually is. I typically blow the machine out once a year and do a fresh install anyway, just to keep things in check and reclaim hard drive space that gets chewed up over time. so maybe this is a sign that the time has come.