Windows 10

Another massive outpouring of Microsoft patches yesterday — more than 1,100 separate patches — brought a few surprises and shouts of indignation from a forced but unannounced upgrade. Some bugs are already evident, and there’s a storm brewing over one Office patch. But by and large, if you don’t use Internet Explorer or Edge, it’s a non-event.

Every version of Windows got patched yesterday (Win10 1709, Win10 1703, Win10 1607, Win10 1511 Enterprise, Win10 1507 LTSC, Win 8.1, Win RT 8.1, Win 7, plus Server 2016, 2012 R2, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008). Almost every version of Office (2016, 2013, 2010, 2007, plus 2013 and 2010 Click-to-Run). Plenty of miscellaneous, too: IE 11, 10, 9 and Edge, Flash for all, SharePoint Server, the ChakraCore package, and various .Nets including ASP.NET. The good news? Unless you use IE or Edge, there’s nothing pressing — you can sit back and watch the bugs crawling out of the woodwork.

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Last month we had no end of problems with Microsoft’s Windows and Office patches. If your machine was attached to a corporate Windows Update server, and your admin approved Windows patches for immediate distribution, your PC may have joined a sea of blue screens. There were lots and lots of additional gotchas.

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As I reported last week, Microsoft released a handful of buggy patches designed to fix the “Unexpected error from external database driver” bug introduced by all of the October Windows security patches. As noted then, the bug fixes have bugs themselves, and the cure is worse than the disease.

Now comes word that Microsoft has not only yanked the bad patches; it’s also deleted the KB articles associated with the patches.

Specifically, all of these KB articles report that the page does not exist:

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Yesterday, Thursday, a date which will live in infamy, Microsoft unleashed patches for five versions of Windows. They were supposed to fix the widely reported bug in all of the mainstream October Windows security patches that gave rise to a bogus “Unexpected error from external database driver” message.

It’s too early to assess all of the damage, but reports from many corners say installing these new patches brings back old, unpatched versions of many files. If you installed one of the patches from yesterday, best to uninstall it. Now.

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