There have been some reports to MS that SP2 for Windows 2003 can fail to install if there are too many updates installed on the computer. Apparently the database that maintains this information can have problem with more than 100 updates. A work around has been posted by Mark Stanfill.
Symptoms of this problem are you get a “Failed to install catalog files” error when you perform a manual installation. You will also get “960.484: InstallSingleCatalogFile: MyInstallCatalog failed for Tmp.0.ntprint.cat; error=0xfffffbfe” in svcpack.log.
Mark has posted a manual and a scripted work around. The latter will prove valuable to anyone deploying SP2 via start up script or via something like SMS.
Credit: Mark Stanfill.