Today we'll talk about Microsoft Service Packs and Hot Fixes. Many computer users know that service packs and updates are to be installed as soon as they appear to decrease computer vulnerability, protect it against hackers, etc. But is it really true?

The history shows that it's not always correct. Sometimes Microsoft adds patches and updates that can crash your system. In the best case you will need to uninstall this patch to keep working. But in the worst cases you will have to reinstall the whole operating system from scratch. And you are lucky if you made a complete backup of your system before you aplied these dangerous service packs or updates.

We can recall several cases when some pf the patches were incompatible with AMD processors. The last issue like this happened a few years ago and Microsoft had to confirm this issue.

In most cases Microsoft tries to hide these dangerous mistakes and simply replaces the updates and the patches or removes them from the windows.update.com web site. In some particular cases the patches make so many damages that it is absolutely impossible to hide this fact. And the information becomes accessible to public.

Usually the most dangerous patches and service packs were published in December. A few years ago one of these updates killed a few computers in my enviroment. I'm a lucky, or better say, experienced guy. I always keep the complete backup of my working machine to be able to restore it whatever happens. So I was able to return back on line in about 20 minutes, and most of this time I was sitting relaxing and waiting for Acronis True Image to restore my system drive. But, according to the statistics, most of the computer users never make any backups not only of their computer systems, but of their personal files as well. I'm not going to say that it's extremely risky. That's up to people to decide if they want to save the data if anything happens to the computer, or they want to keep everything on the computer hard drive and never make any copy of critical files.

Sometimes a very reliable company can sell a computer disk with a virus. I'm not telling that it happens very often, but the history knows these examples. And I don't want to tell the names of these companies, these cases are history now.

But there is a new very interesting example of Microsoft Security Patch that was published just a few days ago and already killed many machined in the world. This security patch is called kb2393802. If you want you can find a lot of pretty links in Google here:
http://www.google.com/#s...amp;fp=d4a7e52ef0af3d83

To make a long story short, this patch simply turns computer into worthless garbage. And you will need to spend hours or even days to recover after this security patch. Is it hard to believe in that? Well, here is the list of the patches that have been published just a few days ago.

Windows Server 2003 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2482017)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2483185)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2478960)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2393802)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2479628)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2476687)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2478971)
Windows Server 2003 Security Update for Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition (KB2485376)

Below are just a few quotes from happy customers without my comments. It's clear what happened ever without additional explanation.

---

KB2393802 - may be causing severe problems

---

Feburary 2011 Microsoft Black Tuesday Summary, (Tue, Feb 8th)

---

Windows Updates - HELP - KB2393802
Hi...

Hope somebody can help me.... today are systems received a load of new updates from our WUS server, a good number of our machines (about 100 of them) which were all Dells decided that they didn't like KB2393802

The machines do an automatic install of updates at 10:00AM, once these machines had installed this update, and restarted, that's all they kept doing, get to the logon screen and keep restarting.

I jumped onto the WUS server and Declined any updates from today (which included the KB2393802, went around every machine with the problem and uninstalled the Security Patch from them, this fixed the problem!

However, I'm a little concered, looking at the event logs on some of these machines that they show that KB2393802 has been downloaded to the machines and is scheduled to install at 10AM tomorrow.... WHY?!?!?

I don't want another repeat of today!!!! Help!!!!!

What can I do?!?!?

Thanks

Matt

---

Glad I'm not alone!!! Posed earlier about BSOD's from updates. Did the same as you and declined all updates from 8/2/11. As I didnt have chance to identify the culrit from about 8 updates etc I just did a system restore from an earlier point. These were Fujitsu PC's and did the same/similar, booted up got almost to logging on screen then blue screened and rebooted. Came to the school at lunch and was faced with three down in the suite and a couple of more by the end of the afternoon. Bet I'm faced with a couple tomorrow as I noticed some were saying they would update at shut down (took option to not install and just shut down).
Googling around shows 'we are not alone!"

---

This update KB2393802 updates the Windows kernel, so it could be many things causing the computer to BSOD.

---

I cannot install more than one at a time otherwise it crashes out in a BSOD. It's annoying, but I can live with that...

The latest issue (the one I'm asking about) is that the latest batch of updates (I'm pretty sure that it's one of both of these: KB2479628 & KB2393802) is making my PC run unstable and stopping my antivirus from working.

When either are installed, my pc freezes on boot and may or may not enter Vista (safemode does still work). If and when it does enter Vista, MSE displays an error symbol stating that it is not functional / turned on. When I try to turn it on, I get a full system freeze requiring a hard restart.

---

Windows update applied KB2393802 around 03:00 and my system no longer boots. I recovered using System Restore in Safe Mode. We've had one other report of this inside IBM, but it's early in the day yet.

It may not be KB2393802; here is my list of fixes applied:

KB2393802
KB2478960
KB2476687
KB2482017
KB890830
KB2483185
KB2479628
KB2485376
KB2492441
KB2478971

Forgive me if there is a better place that this; I rarely come here.

---

I concur - we're having the same problem. Our PCs installed these patches last night through WSUS:

2393802
2478960
2476687
2483185
2479628
2485376
2492441 outlook
2478971

Uninstalling KB2393802 and KB2478960 appears to resolve the issue. Sadly, we appear to have rolled these patches out to 1700+ clients! It's going to be a fun day. :-|

Edit: I Binged this article here http://searchenterprised...ip/Rolling-back-patches on rolling back security patches. Our only apparent options are to roll back each patch manually by browsing to the %SYSTEMROOT%\$NTUninstallKB2393802$\ and %SYSTEMROOT%\$NTUninstallKB2478960$\ folders, then executing spuninst.exe in each.

Any other automated methods out there for rolling back patches?

---

I guess you noticed that the last guy applied this patch to over 1700+ client computers!

In addition - it was a very interesting patch just a few (2-3) months ago. After this patch my extremely powerful and stable system started crashing an freezing. It can simply freeze so that even mouse glues. And the only one solution is reset. I caught computer just before it started getting crazy and was able to recover it. What I found was a serious problem with explorer.exe. The whole screen became jerky and extremely slow. It almost died, but I was able to call the Task manager and kill explorer.exe. After I did that computer kept working as usual. I just restarted a new instance of explorer.exe and that helped me to avoid resetting the computer. But I always have a complete backup of my system drive.

All these cases are real. If you google for them you will find much more examples on the Internet for sure. And this is just the very last example of extremely dangerous Microsoft Patch published a few days ago. People, be careful with that! Don't blame your system administrators for applying these patches. But make them run a complete backup for all your systems on a regular basis to avoid nightmare!

Windows fatal bugs

It really looks like Microsoft was finally able to fix this incredible issue with the random Explorer.exe freezing. At least my computer with Windows 7/64 is much more stable than just a few weeks ago and I can leave it working for days with no visible issues. Just to remind you - a few weeks ago it was freezing from 0 to 5-7 times per day with no reason. Sometimes it was happening when I was away from my computer and the screen and keyboard were locked (Win-L). So I was unable to unlock it upon returning back. But sometimes it was happening during typing and the Reset button was my best friend for a few months. One day I was able to catch Explorer.exe during this process. When the mouse and keyboard started acting very jerky I was able to call the Task manager and kill the process called Explorer.exe. After I restarted this process by typing it in the Task Manager my system recovered and kept working to the end of the day. I guess one (or more?) of Microsoft contractors made a serious mistake causing this issue because the original clean version of Windows 7/64 that was installed a long time ago was almost perfect and didn't have these serious problems. So this error is finally eliminated. How completely and successfully we'll see very soon.

But nothing is perfect. There is still at least one more serious issue bothering a number of computer users - bad USB drivers causing system crash when you connect a new USB device to some of your computer USB ports. In some particular cases one or two USB ports work well. But in many cases the issue affects all the USB ports and as soon as you boot up and connect a new USB device like a smart phone or an external hard drive enclosure the system freezes or goes to BSOD (Blue Screen of Death). Bravo!

The whole Internet is full of these complaints. In some rare cases the people are able to restore the functionality by copying missing files for the appropriate ports, but it looks more like a hack than a fix. Let's wait for a reaction from Microsoft.

There are many other small bugs and issues, not very critical, but sometimes very annoying.

Imagine, that you use USB keyboard and mouse with Windows 7 and one day you decide to schedule a disk check on a system restart. In my particular case the system is unable to get through the complete disk check of my system drive (disk/file Win7 permission jokes, maybe the disk is too large, maybe the cluster size is not standard, I changed it to 64k about a year ago to make disk faster, I'm not sure) and freezes. Of course I press reset and want to skip this test. But once it's scheduled it will go again and again at least until it was successful or you canceled it. But here is a problem - my system cannot pass this test. In theory I can click any key on my keyboard to skip this test before it's started. In theory... Microsoft theory and practice are two independent instances and sometimes they have no relationships at all. In this particular case my Windows 7/64 loads the USB keyboard driver only after the system goes to the password prompt. So when I want to press any key to cancel the disk test it simply doesn't work - the keyboard driver is not yet loaded. Well, lucky me, I got one very old PS/2 keyboard and it saved me couple times when I wanted to cancel this test. If I didn't have it in my closet I could get into a dead loop circling with no chances to restart the system. Nice work, guys!