Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and current MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), has reportedly published a tool designed to detect and fix PCs that may be susceptible to "endless reboots" if they are updated to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3).

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have yet to issue a fix or a patch for the endless reboots that, as previously reported by our own Brandon Dimmel, primarily affects HP machines running Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors.

Johansson posted a link to the tool (a small, 16K Visual Basic Script file that checks whether the PC is running a processor from AMD, and if so, examines the Windows registry to see if a device driver meant for Intel-based machines is set to load) on his blog. If it is, the tool will offer you an option to disable it.

Johansson has been summarizing reports of Windows XP SP3 problems and offering solutions in his blog. Users can also run the script from the command line to check multiple machines on a network.

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