News editor Nicole Kobie spent the best part of an hour swearing at her PC this morning, when it got stuck in a reboot cycle after installing the latest updates. She had to restore her PC to the last known working configuration to coax her system out of its coma.

It seems she’s not the only one. A quick survey of PC Pro’s followers on Twitter shows that several readers are experiencing similar issues.

“The updates appear to install, then during the restart, the laptop freezes during the power down phase and locks up,” reports one.

“A friend of mine’s computer is hanging during the updates. Happens after a reboot too,” reports another.

The Microsoft press office is checking to see whether there are any known issues, and we’ll update you as soon as we can.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already installed the updates, you might want to hold fire.

Aaagh! I’m in the middle of a computer nightmare. Coming in this morning to continue working on a couple of Word files everything looked just as I had left them the night before until I realised that all the work I had done on them yesterday had completely disappeared! It was like groundhog day, but with considerably more aggravation and swearing.

To be fair, a dialog had popped up the day before to warn me that autorecovery saving had been postponed, but I had too many files open to fancy rebooting so I decided to close down some large apps and continue with slightly more Ctrl+S than usual. Everything seemed to work fine and I gave it no more thought.

Clearly during the night, Windows Update had decided to install some patch and shut down Word then rebooted and loaded what it thought was the most sensible files. I’m not sure if this has saved me from a worse nightmare – maybe saving wasn’t working at all and I could have worked on for a couple of days and then hit the problem. However whether it’s Word or Windows, I’m holding Microsoft responsible and in colourful terms.

I’m not quite sure what I should do about this – is a class action feasible? – and am strongly tempted to switch off Windows Update’s auto installing which is always a pain (isn’t this what nag screens are for?) I’m also half hoping that someone knows where my files have gone.

The one thing I do know is that if the dialog reappears I am immediately attempting to save, cutting and pasting into a WordPad backup and rebooting. And I strongly advise you to do the same.

I’ve got Automatic Update turned on and other patches are coming down the pipe with depressing regularity, but not the big boy.

I’ve headed off to Windows Update to see if I can manually tempt the swine on to my system, but the site seems oblivious to XP SP3’s very existence. I’m being offered Office Comaptbility Pack Service Pack 1 (packs for packs? Give me strength), an update for Outlook 2007 and the first Service Pack for Office 2008 Accounting, but not a sniff of the final Service Pack for the most popular operating system in the company’s history.

I’ve even checked the System settings in Control Panel to check Microsoft hasn’t stealthily installed XP SP3 behind my back (As if it could… it can barely manage a tweak of WordPad without setting all the alarms off on my firewall and restarting the PC).

So where on Earth is my SP3? Other colleagues have happily downloaded it via Automatic Update, so I know there’s not a problem there. I’m also aware Microsoft has experienced “compatibility issues” with SP3 that prevents some people from being offered the download. But instead of warning me that I might have a problem, Windows Update is sticking its head in the sand and merrily pretending XP SP3 doesn’t exist, as far as I’m concerned.

I know I can download the patch manually – but I’m worried that if there is a compatibility issue with my system that’s preventing Microsoft from offering SP3 to me through Automatic Update, installing it myself could lead to a whole world of pain. And frankly, the negligible benefits on offer from SP3 don’t justify the risk.

Nevertheless, it’s nice of Microsoft to introduce some fear, uncertainty and doubt into my mind. With a Service Pack, of all things. Good work, guys.