Even if Windows Vista SP1 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, Microsoft has managed to dodge the vast majority of the 100+ million users of the operating system with the service pack. The company cited as a reason for postponing general availability of Service Pack 1 integration problems with third party device drivers and promised that it was working with the hardware manufacturer to resolve the matter by mid-March. Microsoft also needed some extra time to deliver two of the remaining prerequisite updates for Vista SP1, one of which whipped in January- KB935509, with the remaining two dropped on February 12, 2008 - KB938371 and KB937287. And with KB937287 managing to get Vista copies stuck in the infinite reboot loop "stage 3 out of 3 %".

Back on the same day as the RTM of Vista SP1, Mike Nash, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Windows Product Management, pointed to the next couple of months for the delivery of the service pack to end users. "In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com. Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1. In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically. The remaining languages will RTM in April," he stated.

However, Nash neglected to specify the actual release dates for Vista SP1 across March and April. At the beginning of February, on the heels of Vista SP1 going gold, news broke pointing to the potential availability date for the service pack as February 18. But reading between the lines of a change request for the product launch of Vista SP1 from the EMEA CSS BSG - Release Management and Readiness, it is clear that the date was connected with the debut of support for the first service pack of the latest Windows client.

Although the 15,000 Beta testers involved in the development of Vista SP1 were given access to the final bits of the service pack, along with Volume Licensing customers, OEM partners and MSDN and TechNet Plus subscribers, end users will still have to wait until March to get their hands on the RTM build. In this regard, Tech ARP has the still unconfirmed Vista SP1 release schedule. It seems that on March 18, the gold bits of Vista SP1 will be offered via Windows Update, Microsoft Update and the Microsoft Download Center. On April 9, the remaining language versions of Vista SP1 in addition to English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese will be released to manufacturing. Additionally, on April 18, Vista SP1 will start being served via Automatic Updates. These dates have not been confirmed by Microsoft.