I must be forthright, I've dedicated far too much mental energy to a full consideration of Germanic Goddess Jordan Carver as we move closer to Oktoberfest.

This has caused me to be slack in my duties of continuously patching sql server.  I had decided to "sit and wait" while SP3 for SQL 2008 finished it's CTP and not apply any more cumulative updates.

Of course that has now caused me to be burned by two bugs, both of which are patched in either a Hotfix or a cumulative update.

The first was a security patch for something with an XML Editor, I love when other people find my unpatched vulnerabilities in sql server, makes me feel really good.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2494089

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms11-049

The other was an issue with a Microsoft Cluster, the remote registry service kept stopping.  If you haven't noticed you can't connect to cluster administrator if this service is not running, and you can't remotely monitor Perfmon counters without this service.  Of course this is not a sql server problem, so I sent it to the engineers, the engineers were non too pleased and after much needling on my part they did begin to try and figure it out... they were nice enough to show me that sql server was causing this service to fail and that I did not have it patched to the correct level, argh, i love when an engineer points out that we don't have sql patched correctly and it's causing the service I put a ticket in for to crash.  Absolutely lovely. 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2159286

Also be advised that without the remote registry service running, the sql server cumulative update will fail.  You can research the message endlessly or just start the remote registry service, set it to restart every time it fails and try again.  The exact error message is the following message:

SQL Server Setup failure.
------------------------------

SQL Server Setup has encountered the following error:

Failed to retrieve data for this request..