Patch Lady Posts – Windows 7 and the SCARD_E_NO

Patch Lady Posts – Windows 7 and the SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE error

Posted on February 28, 2018 at 23:15 CST by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

Woody wrote ….

There’s a new bug posted for KB 4074598, the Feb Win7 Security-Only patch, that triggers a bizarre error, “SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE”

I wanted to elaborate on Woody’s comment here… that issue is only triggered if you have a smart card deployment on Windows 7. If you don’t have a smart card, you probably won’t see this error. When I’m checking out if a patch issue is widespread I use what I call the “social test”:

Can I see issues on twitter, facebook, in google posted in the last 24 hours and hot topics in the answers forum? If all of those locations are silent, this issue is not widespread. Nor have I seen it in any of my Windows 7 machines where I’ve applied KB 4074598.

So if you are on Windows 7 and do not use a smart card to provide an additional two factor authentication into your machine, I would go ahead and install this update.

The LSM.EXE process and applications that call SCardEstablishContext or SCardReleaseContext may experience a handle leak. Once the leaked handle count reaches a certain threshold, smart card-based operations fail with error “SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE”. Confirm the scenario match by reviewing the handle counts for LSM.EXE and the calling processes in the process tab of Task Manager or an equivalent application.

Monitor the handle counts for the LSM.EXE process and the calling process before and after installing this update. Restart the operating system that’s experiencing the handle leak as required.

Microsoft is working on a resolution and will provide an update in an upcoming release

Windows Patches/Security KB 4074598, Patch Lady Posts, SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE

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