Recently I installed WMP9 onto a W2K machine, and 3 weeks later when the machine was switched on again, I was very surprised to receive 9 windows updates, all of them patches to the new WMP9. If updates work on W2K, they should work on XP, right? Right?

My existing XP images were updated years ago through the official way, when all that stuff was working before m$ killed it all. They have IE8 which is able to use duckduckgo.com/lite as a search engine. But there was one more XP image, it had been accidently installed on the wrong partition and ignored thereafter. SP3 untouched. So I enabled updates and also enabled posready. But no updates were forthcoming. IE8 was as useless as IE6, the only https sites I could get were google and bing, both of which said the browser was unsupported and to go away. HTTP sites worked fine of course.

Next step was to get the so-called SP4 from Major Geeks and install it. Took ages but it worked, as in there were no errors and the machine still functioned. After the reboot, windows update now worked as 3 official updates arrived, one of them a rollup for IE8. But after all that, IE8 still wasn't any better. I have installed MyPal, but it isn't the complete answer, as Cloudflare blocks it.

My question then, is what have I missed out in getting IE8 working correctly on this machine?
- certificates are up to date
- TLS 1.1 and 1.2 are enabled in the registry.