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Microsoft to Patch Problem Patch
slowroller writes to mention an eWeek article about a new patch to fix issues raised in their most recent release. From the article: "The company's plan is to target the rerelease only to Windows users who are affected. In a blog entry, Toulouse said the company's patch deployment technologies will have "detection logic" built into them to only offer the revised update to customers who don't have MS06-015 or are having the problem. The glitches, which Microsoft claims affect only a tiny fraction of the 120 million installations of the patch, stem from a new binary called VERCLSID.EXE that validates shell extensions before they are instantiated by the Windows Shell or Windows Explorer. On systems running Hewlett-Packard's Share-to-Web software, Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall and some NVIDIA Drivers, users complained that the new binary stopped responding."
HP doesn't even write half their own crap anymore. When I worked in HP firmware (last year), the software teams were a joke in our division. No matter what we did, we knew our stuff was better than software.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I'm an Apple user, and it always struck me as odd that they are nervous about upgrades. Each time there's an update, some brave person will install it and report as to how it behaves on that specific Mac. Is it the Firewire-delete-external-harddrive-bug from many years ago that still lives on in memory? Or is it that Apple breaks things in their updates? I have a Powerbook and have not yet experienced that updates hav broken anything on it or my familys Macs. See this forum for more info...
The detection logic is (almost certainly) simply the logic built into Windows Update and the automatic update feature that works out whether you need this patch or not. This is nothing new. Microsoft just updates the XML file to contain the relevant "if this dll exists with this version number then offer this patch" information.
It's the same logic that works out whether you need an Office patch or if your computer infected with a certain piece of spyware and offers a special "patch" to get rid of it before offering to install XP SP2 or if a particular patch is already installed so you don't need it again.
It's quite well established code that's been used for quite some time.
Ok. This patch is really funny - just RTFA:
"What the new [re-engineered] update essentially does is simply add the affected third-party software to an 'exception list' so that the problem does not occur."
So what they did? Made a patch, that breaks some functionality and then added some exceptions not to use it, where it breaks things.
I've got no idea how did they let it happen... patch is basically broken, they know it, some applications don't use that patch, because it breaks them and old bugs normally corrected by ver1 patch are still present there. What was the point of releasing patches again?
Worst support ever...