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Microsoft Yanks Three Bad Patches Of Their Last Outlook Patch (computerworld.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the patches-of-patches dept.

An anonymous reader quotes ComputerWorld's Woody Leonhard: I just received word from Gunter Born that Microsoft has pulled three of its Outlook patches... There's no specific recommendation that you uninstall the yanked patches -- indeed, there's no description of the problems caused by the latest round -- but earlier versions of the bad patches-of-patches had a nasty habit of crashing Outlook... Microsoft still hasn't fixed any of the Office 2007 bugs it introduced in the June security patches.
If you're keeping score at home, the yanked patches are:
  • KB 4011042 - July 5, 2017, update for Outlook 2010
  • KB 3191849 - June 27, 2017, update for Outlook 2013
  • KB 3213654 - June 30, 2017, update for Outlook 2016

10 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. One bad piece by SmaryJerry · · Score: 2

    I didn't update but the update made me unable to search contacts. Meaning I HAD to update or else couldn't search contacts. Not a big deal but maybe this was one of the problems?

    1. Re:One bad piece by sysrammer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah. For me, all indexing stopped at a certain point. I could search older stuff in Outlook, but not newer. It broke File Explorer searches too. I reported it to my IT on 6/30. They ignored it until Wed when the owners started having issues.

      Then they said "We have a patch!". Then "Wait, we have another patch!". Then, "Ok, we have to clear your cache and *then* we have a patch!".

      Indexing still broken.

      --
      His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
  2. Outlook 2016 for Mac - horrible lately by brxndxn · · Score: 2

    I don't know if the update applies to Outlook 2016 for Mac or not.. but after the last update, I have been having the worst experience. I have one email address with my company that I've been with over 10 years. It's hosted with Rackspace. I have hundreds of folders with emails sorted. Periodically, all my emails for that email address disappear out of Outlook and then I see Outlook downloading all 26,000+ emails again. I tried right-clicking and repairing the folder and it made duplicates of every email and email folder. It's done the re-download multiple times now - and I cannot access the emails in Outlook until it's finished. It also adds recurring meetings back to my schedule even if they've been deleted for over a year. I spent hours with Microsoft support (via chat) until I gave up. They had me start a logging service and then another. Then they wanted me to upload the log file but the utility did not support a log file larger than maybe 15mb and my log file was 2.7GB. It basically felt like I was jumping through hoops where they'd give me longer and longer tasks to see how much I would do for them. It's a total mess. Office 2016 is buggy as all hell on the Mac.

    --
    --- We need more Ron Paul!
    1. Re:Outlook 2016 for Mac - horrible lately by Thelasko · · Score: 2

      It's bad for Windows as well. Outlook won't load unless you mouse over the splash screen. (you will likely only notice on a system with multiple monitors) Phantom new emails. Your inbox says there are new emails, but when you search for them they aren't there. Recurring meetings will also randomly get updated.

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  3. FAIL. by sproketboy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Fail again M$

    1. Re:FAIL. by ckatko · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They modded you flamebait. But... is anyone who works to maintain MS products really upset by your comment? I do, and MS has been going downhill for the last decade.

      It's a complete shit ecosystem. Microsoft is no longer a cohesive company. Every product doesn't work with every other product. Dynamics CRM doesn't easily integrate data with Dynamics NAV and will fail on anything except the simplest/emptiest starter companies. Windows 10 has high DPI support... too bad 99% of Microsoft apps don't actually support it. SQL browser ~2015 "works" until you open up a certain dialog and it turns into a super-shrunk, damaged, form element that's completely unusable. Edge browser came out... oh sorry, Edge isn't actually supported in Dynamics CRM. ... Because "Fuck you. That's why." So half of Microsoft tells my clients "Upgrade to Edge, IE is old news!" and the other half say, "Sorry, Edge isn't supported." Which causes tons of friction between IT and management who get new and pretty brochures telling them to upgrade, and then they find out they can't use Magical Widget X because of a MICROSOFT product.

      Windows 10 is a bloated pile of shit. Go ahead, try and install it on a 5400 RPM laptop if you dare (with 6 GB of RAM and >2.5 GHZ processor) and it'll run like a pile of cow dung. It will literally spend HOURS doing nothing but running telemetry, superfetch, "application compatibility", and windows defender. Go to Task Manager, and watch your disk usage be 100% for hours. And disk queue length (the time it takes for a new disk request to be fetched because of the current backlog)? I've seen it hit over 26 SECONDS and I've even got screenshots to prove it. 26 seconds before you loading a file in NOTEPAD can even get a chance to load. The laptop is literally unusable without me manually disabling these services through group policy and registry hacks.

      Except wait, every new Creators Update makes it harder to "fix" Windows 10. On a laptop that came out in 2013!

      Meanwhile, my 2 GB RAM Celeron Chromebook running Linux is happily clinking away. It loads in less than 10 seconds. I can use zram to compress my tiny RAM into something usuable.

      Meanwhile, we ported a client's FULL suite of Sage CRM data over to Dynamics CRM. Literally everything. Even e-mails were correctly saved from outlook and merged with corrected links, to Dynamics CRM. Except Dynamics CRM is such a piece of shit, they literally have bugs in their DATA IMPORT form that refuse to actually apply things like timestamps and creation date fields. There are NO docs that officially say it's broken. And the only fix involves hours of finding the problem, finding an obscure blogger who made a solution... except his solution is also malformed and you have to fix it. And oh yeah, all CRM changes have to go through their GIGANTIC CRM SDK that rivals DirectX in size.

      Another two wonderful features of MS?

      1) They've completely outsourced all of their support to India. Enjoy strange timezones, hard to understand accents, and a complete lack of actual experience to solve your problems. If you can't Google it, they don't know the answer. I've been on TWO separate support tickets with "Microsoft" the last two weeks and spent a literal three hour meeting--half of which was trying to get a bloody screeshare app to work for them.

      2) Windows Updates that brick our machines. (OP post? What?) We're stuck with IE12 because of CRM's only support for IE. And so we have to modify the IE personal security settings slightly from default to keep things running smoothly. OH WAIT. Windows Updates we just found out have been WIPING OUR SECURITY SETTINGS. Because yeah, that's a reasonable idea. Wipe a business's custom security settings every two weeks when we apply Windows Updates.

      My job should be developing solutions for my clients. Clients don't enjoy being billed for fixing Microsoft's broken shit. So thanks, MS, for making my life infinitely harder than it needs to be because your company is falling apart from the ins

    2. Re:FAIL. by sr180 · · Score: 3, Informative

      > Windows 10 has high DPI support... too bad 99% of Microsoft apps don't actually support it.

      I would argue this. Windows 10 doesnt properly support High DPI. There are issues all over the place. Theres no consitency - even amongst its own windows 10 bundled programs. There's constant bugs and issues. Scaling going haywire. Remote desktop to other servers is a crap shoot. And hell, dont remote desktop to your own High DPI machine from a machine thats NOT high DPI - you'll most likely need a reboot of the high DPI machine to fix the issues caused there. Im still looking at windows explorer completely unscaled on a 4k monitor because I was silly enough to remote in from my laptop over the weekend.

      We rolled out 4 4K monitors as a test. They were universally hated across the company because of windows. Im stuck with 2, and the Mac guy has 2. He's loving life!

      --
      In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
    3. Re:FAIL. by Highdude702 · · Score: 2

      Why do I have to set active hours? And can only set a max of I believe 15 hours? Microsoft is allowed to tell me when I can and can't use my computer? That doesn't seem right as I bought the damn thing myself. It's not like they are just letting me borrow it, even if it really seems that way. I don't know why you're defending Microsoft's largest garbage project ever. It's like they hired a bunch of 22 ear olds fresh out of college that have never coded anything except "Hello World!"

  4. Re:I patched Outlook years ago ... by oddware · · Score: 2

    Er ok, the last update was June 23, 2017, version 52.2.1.

    How is that unsupported?

  5. About time by argStyopa · · Score: 2

    AFAICT, the June patch(es) killed our ability to open PDFs or even links directly from Outlook.

    Bit of a bitch going around manually uninstalling patch X to see if it helped (which seemed to only work about 40% of the time anyway).

    --
    -Styopa