A consultant at Microsoft has warned against downloading the patches bundled as an unofficial Windows XP Service Pack 3 package.

The Microsoft employee, Mike Brannigan, was identified as an enterprise strategy and senior consultant by PCWorld.com. He posted his thoughts on the SP3 roundup available on TheHotfix.net:

You would be well advised to stay clear of this FAKE SP3 package. It is NOT suitable for testing as it is NOT SP3.

Anyone who installs this thinking they are getting SP3 (even as a preview) is being grossly mislead and is posing a significant potentially non recoverable risk to their PC and data.
TheHotfix.net’s owner and admin, Ethan Allen, said in the report that his SP3, while not an official version, will be a reasonable preview of the SP3 Microsoft plans to release after Windows Vista launches.

“Our pack is indeed a preview to what the official service pack will be, as these hotfixes will be in Service Pack 3 as proven by Microsoft’s own knowledge base,” according to a post by Allen on TheHotfix.net. “Each of these hotfixes can be obtained for free from Microsoft by calling their support lines.”

As to the potential of a machine becoming unstable as a results of using his SP3 package, Allen said in his post that would be Microsoft’s fault, as it’s their software being installed in the first place.

Someone internal to Microsoft has been providing Allen with the software update information he used to assemble his package. Microsoft is now investigating these leaks, Allen wrote.

David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.