Windows XP Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2 has been leaked and is available for download on torrent websites. Three days after releasing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 to manufacturing, Microsoft launched another development milestone of XP SP3. Following Vista SP1 RTM and Windows Server 2008 dropped on February 4, 2008, XP SP3 RC2 was only released to a pre-selected pool of just 15,000 testers. But it failed to remain private. The second release candidate for XP SP3 is making the rounds of peer-to-peer file sharing networks and is essentially free for the taking for all users with a BitTorrent client.

XP SP3 RC2 comes to the table in no less than seven languages including English, Japanese, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish and Simplified Chinese. This is an obvious evolution from just the five languages sported by the previous localized editions of the service pack's beta builds. The XP SP3 RC2 torrent is set up as a self-extracting executable offering the update package for RC2 of the third and last service pack of Windows XP.

XP SP3 RC2's Build version is 3300, weighing in from just over 300MB to more than 2GB. The full build tag is 5.1.2600.3300 (xpsp.080125-2028). The XP SP3 RC2 v3300 standalone packages that can be accessed via Microsoft Connect include: "windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe; windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-deu.exe; windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-jpn.exe; windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-ara.exe; windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-ptb.exe; windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-esn.exe
and windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-chs.exe."

At this point in time, Microsoft has failed to disclose the release date of XP SP3, and although the development of XP's third service pack was virtually synchronized with that of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008, the RTM date did not coincide.