XML Woes

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.configuration_manage (More info?)

We are a school with about 50 XP Pro SP1 workstations on a 2K server. Running an MBSA scan i get warnings (XP) and an error (2K) that my XML is not service packed. MBSA indicates I have sp1 for XML 3, and the latest is sp4. When i try to apply that i get an error as follows in the dahotfix.log:

[00:30:18]: Checking to see if MSXML 3.0 is currently installed on the machine.
[00:30:18]: Dll existance verified, reading version.
[00:30:18]: Target Dll version: 8.20.9415.0
[00:30:18]: Comparing SP version at target: 20 to 30 at source
[00:30:18]: ERROR: SP version Check failure.
[00:30:18]: MSXML 3.0 is NOT installed on the machine.
[00:30:18]: The action CheckForMSXML30(30) returned FALSE.
[00:30:18]: This action was deemed critical, skiping other actions in this package
Either all of the PreInstallActions for this package returned FALSE, or there was a fatal error while executing an action.
The package will not be installed. This error will not halt the setup process.


I'm kind of at a loss. If i understand correctly XP SP1 should have MSXML 3 SP3. IE 6.0 sp1 should have at least XML 3 sp2. Is it possible that another application overwrote the XML parser with an earlier version (i'm looking at the antivirus as a suspect). I find dll's for xml, xml 3 and xml 4.

How can i move forward?

The 2K server (SP4) behaves similarly but in addition MBSA claims that MS02-008 is not installed.