Microsoft .NET Patch May Make PCs Go "Haywire"

yuna49 writes "Various people are reporting that the MS07-040 patch for .NET released on Tuesday can cause a variety of seemingly unrelated problems. According to the SANS Internet Storm Center 'the reports we got so far seem not to lead to any specific thing that happens in many cases, just various things going haywire.' Some commentators on The Register's report of this story indicate that the patch failed to install at all, while others report things like the mouse suddenly failing to work or long periods of hard drive thrashing. In some cases a hard reboot seems to fix the problem, but other reports suggest that a reinstallation of the .NET framework itself is required. The problems may be related to the MSCORSVW.EXE process which recompiles all the .NET assemblies when the patch is downloaded. While the recompilations are supposed to run as a background task, in some instances the recompilation will drive the processor to 100% usage."

Comments

ProcessExplorer task manager replacement

[StickInTheMud94]

When this 100% cpu utilization was happening I called up Process Explorer http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/util ities/ProcessExplorer.mspx

Win 2k not affected?

[andrewd18]

I installed this on my Windows 2000 box yesterday and I haven't seen any problems so far. *shrug* Maybe it's just a Win XP thing.

Re:Win 2k not affected?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people have just been having problems with their AV scanners locking the file to scan while Automatic Updates wants to begin installing it (see MS KB 883825 [microsoft.com]). That's not a MS issue. It's arguably not even an AV vendor issue. Mostly it's an issue with admins not excluding the updates download directory.

Its nothing to do with admins folders or rights but more to do with a 450+mb temp file being scanned that is created in your .NET directory while it (mscore) recompiles the updated libraries, any virus scanner is going to get upset when its presented with a 450+ mb file to scan

i discovered this temp file creation when a box told me it was out of space with a 1gb free (should be enough) which i thought was odd seeing as the patch was only 8mb
so i did a quick scan of the system using SpaceMonger (an app that visualises file space and shows you which files are large and where) and sure enough there was a huge temp file in the NET directory (it was deleted after patching)

Re:Win2003

[cnettel]

On the other hand, a broken partition table due to a random hardware error (or any other bug causing a write there) would probably not be detected until the next reboot anyway.

XP is actually pretty solid...

[Anonymous Coward]

To all the people that have to say something about how this is just typical Windows for you, what exactly are you doing to your poor machines? I work on XP machines all day, and I find that if they're kept up to date with patches, antivirus, and antispyware then this kind of thing is very rare. 95% of my "Windows" problems are caused by 3rd parties like Adobe doing stupid things with their updaters and such.

Quit clicking on every shiny ad you see - you won't get an Xbox for catching a monkey.

Knowing won't help

[Ropati]

If you follow the update KB article, you'll find MS has already found issues with the update.

See:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928365/

Which leads to:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923100/
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934711/
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923101/
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934793/
and
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931846/

923100 says if you get hosed doing the update, uninstall .NET 2.0, reinstall .NET 2.0 and try to update again. Sounds kind of cyclical to me.