Micro$oft actually recognizes that everyone might not be rushing to install SP2 on their XP machines. So they’re offering this blocking tool.
While recognizing the security benefits of Windows XP SP2, some organizations have requested the ability to temporarily disable delivery of this update via Automatic Updates (AU) and Windows Update (WU). These organizations have populations of PCs, upon which they have enabled AU. This is done to ensure that these PCs receive all critical security updates. Since SP2 will start to be delivered to PCs running Windows XP or Windows XP with SP1 via AU starting on August 16, these customers would like to temporarily block the delivery of SP2 in order to provide additional time for validation and testing of the update.
Heh. Yeah. I can imagine a number of organizations wanting to test this kind of stuff.
Of course, it all goes away in four months. Which, of course, is not that bad an idea, from a security standpoint.
As long as it works.