windows

Yesterday, I talked about the weird bug that makes April’s Win7 Monthly Rollup, KB 4093118, re-install itself over and over, even when Windows Update says that it’s been installed successfully. Windows sleuth abbodi86 has discovered the source of the problem, and it should give you patching pause.

To understand how we got into this mess, you need to understand the bugs that Microsoft introduced in the March Win7 patches and their kludgey patches. Installing either the March Monthly Rollup (KB 4088875) or the March Security-only patch (KB 4088878) may knock your machine off the network. As Microsoft says:

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Last week, Microsoft quietly re-released its buggy April Win7 Monthly Rollup patch, KB 4093118. You may recall the patch as a reaction to the Carnak the Magnificent situation we had with the original version of KB 4093118.

With the re-release earlier this week of the original Carnak patch, KB 4099950, it’s not clear to me what the recommended installation sequence might be. But this much I know for sure. People all over the internet are complaining that this new version of KB 4093118 installs itself over and over again.

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Yesterday, the third Tuesday of the month, Microsoft dumped another big bucket of patches:

• KB 4093117 brings Win10 1703 up to build 15063.1058, many miscellaneous fixes, no known issues.
• KB 4093120 brings Win10 1607 to build 14393.2214, a similarly large bunch of fixes, no known issues.
• KB 4093113 is the regular Monthly Rollup Preview for Win7.
• KB 4093121 is the similar Monthly Rollup Preview for Win 8.1.
• The Update Catalog says there’s a new version of KB 4099950, the abandoned patch for fixing the NIC/static IP bug in Win7.

There are lots of oddities in this motley collection.

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A Windows Ink engineer has confirmed that there’s a bug in the third Win10 1709 March Cumulative Update, KB 4089848, that breaks common pen movements in Photoshop, Lightroom and CS Paint. Looks as if the same problem bedevils this month’s 1709 Cumulative Update, KB 4093112, as well. Microsoft, it seems, decided to break pen behavior in Win10 1709 without any notification or explanation.

Early this month, DavideV, on the Microsoft Answers forum, posted a rather strange observation:

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With all of the problems in the January, February and March patches for Windows and Office, you’d think we would catch a break in April. In one sense we did — some of the worst bugs in the earlier patches now seem to be behind us. But we’re definitely not out of the woods just yet.

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Most of us expected Microsoft to drop its latest and greatest version of the last version of Windows yesterday. The highly anticipated version 1803, Redstone 4 — which many of us have been testing for weeks — looked ready to go … until it wasn’t.

Rumors are flying but, as of this writing, the actual cause for the delay isn’t public.

Microsoft, of course, has never committed to a release date. Or a build number. Or even a hokey “Spring after Fall Creators Update” style name, for that matter. (I’m still plugging for “Terry Myerson Swansong version” but doubt it’ll gain traction.)

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March Windows patches were a mess. With the revelation of Total Meltdown, we recently discovered that all of this year’s Win7 patches left gaping security holes. It’s fair to say that the initial Patch Tuesday patches for almost every version of Windows, for every month this year, have had confirmed bugs. Every one.

If you want to help test this month’s Windows and Office patches, hey, I salute you! Most folks, though, would be well advised to turn off Automatic Update and wait for the initial wave of devastation to pass.

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The quality of March’s patches set new lows, even by Windows’ tarnished standards. The Win10 patches flew fast and furious, with new Microsoft-induced bugs introduced and swatted multiple times over the month. The Word 2016 security patch demands that you first install the Word 2016 non-security patch, or Word refuses to open files. That bug hasn’t been fixed. Windows 8.1/Server 2012R2 escaped relatively unscathed. Server 2008 got a fix for its buggy patch, KB 4090450, on April 3. But Windows 7… ah, that’s a dying horse of a completely different color.

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