Internet Explorer Plug-ins

Yay for more ranting about issues! I just reformatted my laptop since it decided to not load explorer on start-up. However, when I went to start updating Windows Xp Professional I ran into a small error...or not so small error:0x8ddd0004. This error is actually a missing plug-in that IE uses to download Windows Updates and naturally without it a Windows PC cannot download updates.
Microsoft's fixes for it were a joke, I tried every single one and after I ran out started looking on the forums. As a last ditch effort I searched Microsoft's website for download muweb.dll and download MUWebControl Class plug-in. Surprisingly, neither search yielded any downloads for the said plug-in.
I went and searched IE plug-ins via their search option found in the manage add-ons window and still found nothing! Now I am getting a little angry as this really should be online to download for users that are in my predicament.
Finally, I get the bright idea to figure out where the plug-in is on my other computer and copy and paste it from the system32 folder on that computer to the same folder on my laptop and see if that solves the issue. Amazingly, it worked!
My issue now is, what would have happened if I did not have another computer to copy and paste the plug-in from? Or what if I could not figure out how to find the plug-in on my other computer? I would have been taking another hour to two just to format the thing again! Clearly, I did not want to have to do that again. The fix for that problem as a last fix should be a download of the MUWebControl Class plug-in, right? Obviously, Microsoft did not think that it was a good idea to direct users to this end since there was nothing in their help documentation. This disgusts me, period.