Well, it is with a heavy heart that I must report on the current state of Microsoft Security Essentials where it involves Windows FLP. It appears that MSE v4 is still unable to install on WinFLP.
I find this particularly odd, since I recently demonstrated that MSE v4 installs successfully on a whole host of “unapproved” systems, from Windows XP 64-bit and Windows 2003 R2 Server all the way up to Windows 2008 R2 Server. In fact, WinFLP is the only modern (post Win2k) version of Windows that MSE v4 seems to be unwilling to install on.
Strange… very strange.
And what makes this all the more frustrating is that WinFLP is essentially a minimized version of Windows XP Professional. It has all the same functionality as XP Professional, it is just missing a lot of the “fluff” such as games and other useless utilities like MS Paint. When it comes to the core Operating System, it is functionally identical to XP Professional, and would have absolutely no problems running Microsoft Security Essentials.
By Kameel Ali 2014-04-08 - 23:53
Good blog you have here.
I know that this may be late but, found a possible solution to this via tomshardware.com:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/255513-45-0x8004ff04-install-upgrade-error-winxp
To download previous versions of MSE, visit filehippo.com and search for it there.
Hope it helps you and/or others.
By rekabis 2014-04-18 - 12:56
The problem with this solution is that once you make that registry change, the system is no longer Windows XP FLP, and the license key gets rejected. Plus, when I tried to do this in a VM (I wasn’t going to risk my main FLP rig on this trick), I was unable to change the registry key back to what it was before. For some reason the edit only goes in one direction. And since I did not have any spare license keys for XP Professional, I had to leave my physical system as-is.
With that said, XP is now EOL (End Of Life) and should not be used on anything that will connect to the Internet anymore (hackers will be swarming out of the woodwork over the next few months with stockpiled 0-day exploits, and any variant of XP will be almost trivial to attack by the end of 2014), and MSE is now pretty well at the bottom of the Antivirus rankings in terms of effectiveness. Still, MSE is a whole heckofalot better than nothing, but there are certainly much better free offerings out there. If you are curious, I strongly recommend BitDefender Free. It requires “registration” to work beyond two weeks, but it has a very light footprint on almost any computer, and is completely free, very responsive and highly effective.