I'm having the exact same problem. If i leave it out of svcpack.inf and install after installation. No problem. I also notice a version difference of the iexplore.exe which is 7.00.5730.13 before the 2 hotfixes and 7.00.6000.xx afterwards. So no fully patched IE7 after unattended I'm still looking into the problem. I also tried slipstreaming the IE6 version of the patches into xp setup , but with no luck. p.s. Windows Update fails to install the 2 updates also. 1 even fails the download.