Two of these took out a memory module and the problem went away leading them to believe the memory was bad. I seem to recall seeing a bug report that early XP didn't decompress huge files correctly.

I had the error too.

Now, I'm having a hard time believing the file is corrupt. It came from the net, to my laptop, to a thumb drive to the hard drive of the target system.

So I tried the file from the thumbdrive. On the target system is won't decompress and says the file is corrupt, on my laptop it works just fine.

Now hang on, a file is either corrupt or it's not. The same file can't be corrupt on one system but not another.

I don't buy the bad memory idea, even if it does fix the problem. I uncompressed SP2 on a system that would do it, then installed it on the target system. Then I tried to uncompress SP2 again and this time it works fine.

You know what this means boys and girls? There never was a problem with the file, it never was corrupt, it's the program that uncompresses it that's screwed up. On a *patched* XP system this works, but on an unpatched system it won't uncompress properly. You have to apply the patch to be able to uncompress and install the patch and God knows how many people threw away memory because they found by removing 1 of two sticks the file would uncompress.

What happened of course is some programmer never tested this on a system with a gig of RAM or more and until the SP2 patch the uncomress program pukes if it has more than a certain amount of RAM and when people take a stick of RAM out the bug never manifests itself.