Was working on the computer late on the 27th and I saw there were new Windows updates available (8.1 Pro, x64). I'd heard about the update issues two weeks ago but figured that had all been taken care of and the updates were pulled so this was fine.
Big mistake.
Machine BSOD'ing after launch and none of Microsoft's fixes worked.
1) If I tried to boot into safe mode, which is still supposed to work -- BSOD
2) There is a font cache file that supposedly is causing the crash. You're supposed to boot into safe mode to remove it. Okay, I boot into a Mint from a thumb drive and delete the file from out of my C:\Windows\System32 folder, unmounted the drive manually to make sure changes were written back, and rebooted -- Still BSOD.
3) Tried using system restore points. Windows set one just before these updates. Windows was not able to restore to that point. Tried the previous one from an update to OpenOffice three days before this. That one was also no good. Tried the last one, one from the 20th -- when the previous set of Windows updates had been applied. Success. Now, straight from the horse's mouth, my Windows should now be rolled back to a time before the Windows Updates before the problematic updates were installed.
Rebooted... BSOD at the exact same place in the process. No change at all.
I can't uninstall the updates if I can't boot into the actual WIndows install it seems. There's no way to remove the updates from the recovery console (found a blog entry on how to do this in XP, but the updates aren't kept in the same folder structure and my ability to run things on the effected install seems much more limited in these later versions).
As I'm typing this I'm running on the Mint flash drive and have Grsync doing a verified copy of my user folder from my C drive to one of my other internal disks, so I can do a reformat and reinstall of all my programs. Just what I wanted to do on my weekend!