Windows XP Service Pack 3

Ed Bott mentions the story that a French Microsoft executive confirmed the intention of creating another service pack for XP. While I firmly believe that such a service pack is on the drawing boards I have great doubts that it will ever exist. I think it will go the way of Windows NT 4.0 SP7 and Windows 2000 SP5. Both of which made it past the Beta 2 stage and I believe to the RC stage before being killed off. In both cases the reason was that customers asked MS not to release it. Instead in both cases we have security roll-ups instead. If you search the MS knowledge base you can see refrences to each of the ill fated SP. I have a feeling sometime in early 2007 there will be a similar story come out about XP SP3 and how a security roll-up will be released in its place. There will also be other upgrades like avalon released, just not a mamoth (300 MB) patch. Just my guess.