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."

Re:Affected

[AuMatar]

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.

Apple users are nervous about updates

[nordicfrost]

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 [apple.com] for more info...

Microsoft also lies in its knowledgebase articles.

[dick pubes]

Last year when I had my problem with Windows 2000 hosing my system's partition table because installing it with Service Pack 3 on, THEN installing Service Pack 4 was insufficient to prevent it from hosing the partition table on a big disk when the outer portions of the disk eventually ended up being used, I finally dug up a Microsoft Knowledgebase article that admitted that "some disks" geometry wouldn't be read correctly in that situation.

Nowhere did Microsoft identify WHAT disks, WHY, or HOW. It was a "throwaway line" like that referenced in the present article. Microsoft was happy to say that LBA48 was supported by Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, but NOT that if you installed it first WITHOUT Service Pack 4 and then installed SP4, that Windows 2000 would silently wait until you actually tried to use the larger partitions before trashing your hard drive.

Re:Again? What?

[swmccracken]

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.

Those who have been sacked . . .

[Dausha]

I have a friend in law school who was a victim of this last patch. She was complaining that attempting to use the menubar of any IE-based interface caused her system to lock up. She could double click on an icon to open a document, but she could not save it without locking up. (I don't know if she could use CTRL-S.)

I noticed that my laptop's touchpad started acting the way the little markings said it should (i.e., the scroll part of the pad finally scrolls). This is quite annoying after having gotten used to it _not_ working.

Funny one...

[Viraptor]

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...

Re:Millions of different system configurations.

[Anonymous Coward]

but that theres a big problem with testing at our facility before rolling out patches.

With this particular patch, I'm not sure how I'd have tested for this problem with it. It only happens sometimes on some computers. At my office, my computer is the only one affected, everyone else has no problems at all. My IE will just stop going to websites (I type addresses in the bar, and nothing happens when I hit enter. Not even an hourglass or a change in the status bar), "My Computer" displays folders for all the icons in the tree view, and closing the window causes the entire explorer shell to exit and reload. Occasionally alt-tabbing into putty makes putty think the mouse button is being held down. And of course killing the 10 or so processes i've accumulated during all of this makes everything go back to normal for a few hours.

Hopefully this "detection logic" will detect that I've got a problem here, since I'm 99% sure (wouldn't put it past dell to install nvidia drivers for my ati card) I don't have any of the software mentioned in the article.

Re:Heh - "tiny" fraction could still be "lots"

[malelder]

They make no profit from their own bugs. If the problem is caused by a bug in their software, the charges for that support request are reversed.