Irish Steve
18th Apr 2006, 23:10
Folks.
The latest M$ aautomatic patch update is a can of worms.
On 2 different machines today I've had major problems as a result of a bad update in the latest cycle.
IE unable to get to a web site unless it had the full http:\\www. prefix on the address, and the same machine freezing the Office application when attempting to save to a folder in "my documents".
There is also a VERY STRONG possibility that it is causing all sorts of strange woes where HP printers or cameras are installed on the machine.
On my machine here at home, after several minutes doing things in various applications, when attempting to update a user profile online, the mouse froze, to the extent that the pointer would not move at all, and then subsequent to that, having rebooted, not only did the mouse freeze, the keyboard went up it's own orifice as well, leaving the OS button as the only way out (OS button being the Ohhhhh sh1t button from MANY years ago on a machine that predated PC's by about 20 years). The only saving grace is that XP recovers more gracefully from this sort of thing than 98 used to.
There is an avoidance procedure, documented on M$ support site, but if you're having anything like the problems I did, even getting there is going to be tedious, so the link to the patch is:-
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918165
It needs a Huge key entering in the registry, and what seems to be the safest way to do it is to access the patch, cut and paste the key bit into notepad, but with care as follows, to avoid getting an invalid entry in the registry.
Open regedit and navigate to the key field that has to be patched. BEFORE right clicking the "cached" item to enter the new key, cut the new key into scratchpad, as if you try to cut it after opening "cached", you will end up with an invalid entry in the registry as it saves it with the wrong Dword data when you try to copy it. On one of my machines, there was no "Cached" field, so I had to create it, which is not documented at all in their avoidance. After creating the key, update the data value to 1, and then, to be safe, I rebooted, though I don't know if that's necessary or not.
On the basis of what I've seen today, this is a major fcuk up, which should have been found long before it got out into the real world, and the potential damage it's doing now probably outweighs the damage the original security scare caused. The big hassle is that it's not consistent, there are a number of possible failures, some of which seem completely unrelated to the area that the patch was resolving, thus making it very hard to diagnose.
You have been warned.
The latest M$ aautomatic patch update is a can of worms.
On 2 different machines today I've had major problems as a result of a bad update in the latest cycle.
IE unable to get to a web site unless it had the full http:\\www. prefix on the address, and the same machine freezing the Office application when attempting to save to a folder in "my documents".
There is also a VERY STRONG possibility that it is causing all sorts of strange woes where HP printers or cameras are installed on the machine.
On my machine here at home, after several minutes doing things in various applications, when attempting to update a user profile online, the mouse froze, to the extent that the pointer would not move at all, and then subsequent to that, having rebooted, not only did the mouse freeze, the keyboard went up it's own orifice as well, leaving the OS button as the only way out (OS button being the Ohhhhh sh1t button from MANY years ago on a machine that predated PC's by about 20 years). The only saving grace is that XP recovers more gracefully from this sort of thing than 98 used to.
There is an avoidance procedure, documented on M$ support site, but if you're having anything like the problems I did, even getting there is going to be tedious, so the link to the patch is:-
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918165
It needs a Huge key entering in the registry, and what seems to be the safest way to do it is to access the patch, cut and paste the key bit into notepad, but with care as follows, to avoid getting an invalid entry in the registry.
Open regedit and navigate to the key field that has to be patched. BEFORE right clicking the "cached" item to enter the new key, cut the new key into scratchpad, as if you try to cut it after opening "cached", you will end up with an invalid entry in the registry as it saves it with the wrong Dword data when you try to copy it. On one of my machines, there was no "Cached" field, so I had to create it, which is not documented at all in their avoidance. After creating the key, update the data value to 1, and then, to be safe, I rebooted, though I don't know if that's necessary or not.
On the basis of what I've seen today, this is a major fcuk up, which should have been found long before it got out into the real world, and the potential damage it's doing now probably outweighs the damage the original security scare caused. The big hassle is that it's not consistent, there are a number of possible failures, some of which seem completely unrelated to the area that the patch was resolving, thus making it very hard to diagnose.
You have been warned.