Was Service Pack 2 the result of a great vision by Microsoft to make the Windows XP operating system more secure? Forget about it. The massive software update only slowly evolved into its final massive form. "The initial vision was, we were going to enable the firewall, and we were going to ship it," Todd Wanke, Group Program Manager for Microsoft told SuperSite. The project should have taken but a few months.

The group interview with several of the SP2 development team members offers an interesting inside look at how the most important service pack in Microsoft's history came into existence; how enabling the firewall set in motion a domino of broken applications and forced the developers to add more and more functionalities to the update; how the work on SP2 derailed the development timeline for Longhorn.

The project was exhausting, and he would never again do anything similar, swore Wanke. "Absolutely not. No, I'm not sure what I'm going to do next, but I won't do this again."