I've done a bit of reading around on this and whilst it clearly ain't good for Microsoft to issue wpdates that cause people problems, I have seen a few references that suggest that upgrading HP and/or NVIDIA devices to the latest drivers will clear this issue.
For example this articla at
ActiveWin.com
#12 By NotParker (361 Posts) at 4/18/2006 2:00:45 PM
More info:
http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/default.aspx
"Hi everyone, Mike Reavey here again. I wanted to follow up with the results of our investigation into some issues with security update MS06-015. Turns out that under certain circumstances, changes introduced in MS06-015 could cause an application to stop responding during specific interactions
with older versions of Hewlett Packard’s “Share-to-web” software utility, or older NVIDIA video card drivers. In the case of the Hewlett Packard software, their new version known as “HP Image Zone Version 5” is not affected. Neither are the most recent NVIDIA graphics card drivers. So customers running these more recent versions are not affected by this issue. The current versions of the Hewlett Packard and NVIDIA software are available from the manufacturer websites.
To give you some idea of the scope of the problem,
so far out of over 120 million successful installations of the MS06-015 update, the number of calls related to this issue is currently well under a thousand. Of course, even one customer having a problem is too many and that’s why we’ve been working on investigating this and determining solutions. We are also continuing to monitor the situation to measure scope and impact.
We’ve updated security bulletin MS06-015 to document this issue. In addition, we published knowledge base article 918165, which details the older software this issue affects. We’ll be updating that soon to provide locations to the updated software that is unaffected by this issue. We’re working directly with the manufactures of the affected software to assist customers.
So to be clear, customers who are running the latest NVIDIA drivers, or who are running the current version of the Hewlett Packard Image Zone software are not impacted. Customers who believe they are affected should upgrade to the latest versions of the affected software, or they can contact Microsoft Product Support Services for assistance. Contact Product Support Services in North America for help with security update issues at no charge using the PC Safety line (1-866-PCSAFETY) and international customers by using any method found at this location:
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/securityhome
Meanwhile we're still looking at the best way to assist customers who may have been impacted by this and I encourage everyone to review KB article 918165 or contact us using the number above if they think they are having the problem."
So, as you suggest, could be worth removing your drivers & programs and downloading the latest from the HP website?
Haven't actually [had to] try this as I have not experienced problems myself. I don't have any HP devices and my NVIDIA onboard graphics seem to be fine (touch wood!)
RC