March 12th, 2008KB948496 hits WSUS, Windows Update, and Automatic Updates
We’ve awoken this morning to most of our servers requesting to install the update which disables the Scalable Networking Pack. Surprisingly Microsoft has decided to push this update out globally. Since MS has decided it was a bad idea to turn on SNP by default, this is probably the end of the issue. Capable drivers or not, with it disabled everything should return to normal. It will, however, be very interesting to see what the fallout from this update is. 
March 12th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
The fallout….fixed a slow network issue, but caused the majority of my XP Pro clients not to be able to connect to server. I have been on tech support with Microsoft for hours and still no fix.
Caution: Make sure you have the very latest drivers for your NIC’s installed and be ready to back this out…FAST.
March 13th, 2008 at 5:14 am
The fallout is bad if you aren’t ready. I use WSUS and when this puppy installed it took out my beta patch group. I had login to each server (which takes about 5-10 min with the now-crippled network adapters) and *disable* TCP Offload Engine and RSS. Tomorrow I will disable this on ALL my servers.
Great patch. Avoid it if you can.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:13 am
I think this patch caused my Exchange 2003 OWA stop functioning normally: OWA times out every 20 seconds, and the preview pane requests log in too. Right-click to clean Junk E-mail shows error and those folders failed to update email counts. I noticed same folder update problem on my client Outlook too. Bad patch.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:39 am
I uninstalled KB948496 and OWA works fine now. Bad patch!!!
March 18th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Up to now I thought this patch does only disturb x64 machines. Maybe I may refer to my post “http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?query=KB948496&dg=&cat=en_US_d02fc761-3f6b-402c-82f6-ba1a8875c1a7&lang=en&cr=&pt=&catlist=&dglist=&ptlist=&exp=&sloc=en-us”
I would like to know on what server hardware do James, Chris and Seth have this problem.
Thomas
March 20th, 2008 at 5:44 am
Horrible! Applied this to my DC’s - HP DL360G5’s - both servers identical in every way I can see bought at the same time last August serial numbers only 1 different. The PDC is fine and happy - but every time I apply this to my other DC it totally looses all network connectivity forcing me to go to the machine console and roll it back - cards and drivers and settings are identical - NOT using RSS or TOE - I even tried downloading a fresh copy but the same result.
The machine it doesn’t work on has only 1 thin different it has a PCIe SCSI card for my tape system.
Crock of C***
jc
March 27th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
[...] It appears there is a conflict between that patch and the Broadcomm NIC drivers in our HP server. There's some general chatter about the patch here. [...]
March 31st, 2008 at 4:45 pm
For any one having problems after applying 948496, also disable RSS and/or TCP Offload on your NIC or NIC team. I have seen several issues where leaving RSS enabled on the NIC team (while off in the OS) was causing problems. Of course you can also turn SNP features back on if they were working well for you.