• MS-DEFCON 4: Apply Microsoft patches, but watch out for a couple of problems

    Posted on April 10, 2015 at 10:48 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    Looks like Microsoft has ironed out the problems in the March Black Tuesday crop, but if you’re smart you’ll watch out for two problem areas.

    First, if you use Internet Explorer (how old school!), you should avoid the patch rollup KB 3032359. Microsoft acknowledges that “applications may crash when they render table-based content in Internet Explorer 11, 10, 9 and 8.” Of course, if you don’t use IE, feel free to blast away.

    Second, if you have Windows 7 SP 2 SP 1  or Windows 8.1 Update 1, and you know that you’ll never want to upgrade directly to Windows 10, avoid KB 3035583. It installs an ad-delivery machine for Win10 that you don’t need.

    Other than that, the patches, re-released patches, and patches of patches of patches (even KB 300850 and KB 2919355 from November!) now appear to be working. Go ahead and install them. It looks like Microsoft has fixed KB 3023607 (breaks AnyConnect and other VPN clients) and 3013455 (Vista fuzzy fonts), both of which dogged us last month. The old December 2014 Office patches, KB 2726958 for Office 2013, KB 2553154 for Office 2010, and KB 2596927 for Office 2007, are now fixed: They no longer break Excel macros, as best I can tell. So other than the two items mentioned above, we’re good to go.

    I’m moving us to MS-DEFCON 4: There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented here. Check this site to see if you’re affected and if things look OK, go ahead and patch. 

    The usual admonition applies: Use Windows Update, DON’T CHECK ANY BOXES THAT AREN’T CHECKED, reboot after you patch, and then run Windows Update one more time to see if there’s anything lurking. When you’re done, make sure you have Automatic Update turned off.

    Sorry it’s so late this month, but problematic March and April patches have been bouncing around the halls for the past few days.

    Windows Patches/Security , , , , , , ,
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