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Microsoft's Emergency Internet Explorer Patch Renders Some Lenovo Laptops Unbootable (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the watch-out dept.

Earlier this month, Microsoft issued an emergency patch for Internet Explorer to fix a zero-day vulnerability in the web browser. The problem affects versions of Internet Explorer from 9 to 11 across multiple versions of Windows, but it seems that the patch has been causing problems for many people. Specifically, people with some Lenovo laptop have found that after installing the KB4467691 patch they are unable to start Windows, reports BetaNews.

2 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. IE didn't cause this problem by Daltorak · · Score: 5, Informative

    I know it's fun and exciting to blame a web browser hotfix for a booting problem..... especially when it's Internet Explorer, right? But..... ahhh, shit, hate to spoil the fun, but this is just another case of "journalists" not doing the bare minimum of reading before shitting out another article they'll get paid $10 for.

    This booting problem with Lenovo laptops has existed for a month and a half -- it was introduced in the November 2018 cumulative security update. It even says so right there in the patch notes! But because these "journalists" don't know how to read anymore, we end up with Slashdot articles like this one that don't have the correct information in them.

    All Windows patches are now cumulative, so sure, if you apply the IE hotfix to a machine that is three months behind in updates, then you can hit this problem. But it's not the IE part that's causing it.

  2. Here's a 1995 MSDN article on iDispatch in COM by raymorris · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's an article that Microsoft added to MSDN in 1995.
    The second half of the article covers iDispatch, a style of COM interface.
    https://web.archive.org/web/20...

    Here's the 1996 Microsoft announcement officially announcing the ActiveX name and their strategy for presenting it as a web technology, in which they say "ActiveX controls (formerly COM components)". The Microsodt announcement says thousands of COM/ActiveX components were already available, but could now be used in the web browser (IE 3.0).
    According to Microsoft's announcement, ActiveX controls" were formerly called "COM components". According to their announcement, many companies had already been making them, as "COM" for desktop software, prior to IE 3.0 supporting them and the change to the ActiveX branding.

    One reason I remember this so clearly is that I was one of the people making COM components at the time it was rebranded ActiveX. I know I didn't have to change my software in order to make my existing COM components, including a styleable linear "slider" control I designed, into ActiveX components - the only change was the branding.

    You are correct that Active Desktop was September 1997.