Windows XP "Please wait..."

Hopefully this is just a quick question, and doesn't turn out to be some sort of endless romp in the land of malware… Yesterday afternoon, our laptop which is running Windows XP SP3 received a single update, which it installed when I shut it down. This afternoon, when I turned it back on, I turned away from the computer for a moment and turned back to see a Windows XP startup screen (the blue one you get after the black splash screen with the logo and progress bar), which said "Please wait…" in white in the upper left corner. I have no idea if it said anything before that, and it booted up as normal before showing that screen, and continued to the "Welcome" screen and whatnot afterwards. I shut down and restarted to see if it'd do it again and it did not. I was just wondering, could this have been the result of the update? Is there anything I need to worry about? I'm currently preparing to run Spybot, SUPERAntispyware, MalwareBytes, and Avast! full scans, just to be sure, but I figured you guys might be able to shed some light on the issue. Thanks in advance!

It doesn't sound as though there is a problem, and if your scans are clear and the computer is running well, then this is further good news. Presumably you have a disc image of your boot drive kept safe on removable media? Regards paws

It sounds like the update you applied needed to update files that were in use while running and had to be replaced on the next boot. You see this when you update Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player too. Nothing to worry about.

Edit: That's also why it required a reboot after it installed.