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You know that businesses will be able to pay for Win7 security patches after Win7 hits end-of-life on Jan. 14. Many of Microsoft’s Extended Security Update program details aren’t clear to me — How does a very small business buy ESU? Why is Microsoft releasing Edge on Win7 the day after it goes end-of-life? Will that new full-screen nag keep coming back? — but there’s one loose end that sits in the middle of my confusion.

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Patch Tuesday in December rarely brings anything worthwhile — everybody’s on vacation, or wants to be on vacation — and this month’s no exception. We got patches for 36 separately identified security holes and two new advisories, full of sound and fury but covering very little.

The one “exploited” security hole — CVE-2019-1458 Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability — shouldn’t cause any heartburn. Microsoft says:

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The November passel of patches didn’t include anything earth-shattering; there were no emergency security breaches storming the gates, but good patching hygiene dictates that you get your machine braced for the next round.

If you install patches manually one by one (“Group B,” which I don’t recommend for mere mortals), you need to make sure you have the proper Servicing Stack Updates in place. They’ve all changed in the past month.

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Although we’ve been promised no “C” or “D” week second cumulative updates for the rest of the year — at least for Windows — Microsoft has acknowledged a bug it created in last week’s Patch Tuesday Office patches, and now promises that it’ll update the bad fixes on most machines this week or next. Those are “C” week and “D” week, respectively.

The cause du jour: a bug in all of this month’s Office security patches that throws an error in Access saying, “Query xxxx is corrupt,” when in fact the query in question is just fine. Microsoft describes the erroneous error message on its Office Support site:

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