Microsoft on Tuesday announced a delay in the expected general release of Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), due to a newly found discovered incompatibility. The company said that it had uncovered a compatibility issue between its retail chain management solution for small and midsize customers, Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), and the updates (both Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1). The update was released to manufacturing last week and was expected to be generally available on April 29th and later in early Summer as an automatic update; however, Microsoft did not provide any details on revised public release date (which had been released to volume customers last week), but said that update would be available after appropriate filter to prevent update from being applied to some systems).

The third official XP service pack includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates and hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases as well as new functionality such as Network Access Protection (NAP), an update of Windows Product Activation, and security improvements such as improved black hole router detection (those that are silently discarding packets).

"In order to make sure customers have the best possible experience we have decided to delay releasing Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center," the company said in a statement obtained some publications. "To help protect our customers, we plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Download Center."

The company says that until it has published a fix for the issue, it recommends that Microsoft Dynamics RMS customers not install either service pack and that customers running Microsoft Dynamics RMS and the new updates (Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1) contact Microsoft Customer Support Services for additional information. The fix is currently in testing and we will be available after that process is complete, the company said.

"We plan to put filtering in place shortly to prevent Windows Update from offering both service packs to systems running Microsoft Dynamics RMS [and] once filtering is in place, we expect to release Windows XP SP3 to Windows Update and Download Center," the spokesperson added.