guitarzan,
I appreciate your intended helpfulness, but you missed my point.
I don't want to slipstream an installation CD. I've done that before, and can do that if I want to. This is a different need. I want to be able to update a system without having to start from a clean, formatted partition with nothing on it. Maybe I already have the OS, SP2 and several mobo drivers, peripheral drivers and low-level apps installed. I don't want to have to do that all over again.
I already have XP SP2 installed. I already have the updates downloaded. All I want to do is install them in one operation on the second new machine (which also already has SP2.)
And I have DVD images of the OS clean install partition(s) with SP2 installed, mobo drivers, and a few low level apps.
Now, I want to install the updates. If I don't like the result, or some patch is screwing everything up, I want to reload the clean install SP2 image, and re-install the critical and important updates without having to install them one at a time and reboot 40 times. I may want to add one or delete one from the list to be installed.
I may not know I have a problem until after I install Office 2003 or some third party app and have spent six months working with the system.
To kick one patch out of the system, I will need to roll back to an image that does not contain it, and move forward from there again. So having a way to install all of the needed patches in one operation is the goal. (Yes, in some cases I could UN-install one, but, no ... I can't. Not and sleep, too. And there are patches that cannot be uninstalled.)
By 'non-update.exe' patch, I did not mean what you thought. I meant patches that are not installed by the MS update.exe installer program, such as updates to Internet Explorer.
I have other systems to update here, too. In each case, there may be anthing from several to very many updates to install. I may try a list of updates, and discover that one of them is crashing my system, or turning it into molassas or a stutterer with a speech impediment. When I know which update is crashing the system, I want to be able to go back to the most recent image that does not contain that update, and then re-install everything that came afterward except that one.
And another use for this is, I am never again going to turn on the 'Automatic Updates' feature for reasons that many, I am sure, are already well aware of. It may be that I will find myself with a dozen new updates to install on four or five systems some months from now. I don't want to install a dozen updates one at a time on five different systems.
I appreciate your willingness to be helpful and your offer of additional information, but I am really seeking only one kind of information here.
In short, I am looking for one particular system management technique---one of many in the overall picture: the one called "How to install multiple update patches in one operation."
That's all.
--torandson