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August was a banner month for Windows and Office customers. If I counted correctly, we saw patches on 14 different days last month. The current list of outstanding problems with those patches weighs heavily on my mind, but with the first September non-security Office patches due today, and the September security patches due in a week, it’s time for you to get the August patches out of the way.

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There’s no official confirmation, and no explanation of course, but overnight Microsoft pulled a patch that was supposed to fix the main problems in this month’s Windows 7 security updates. I talked about the repair hotfix yesterday in “Microsoft repairs buggy Win7 security patch with buggy hotfix KB 4039884.” Today, the repair hotfix isn’t available any more.

All we know for sure is that, sometime last night, the Microsoft Update Catalog entry for KB 4039884 disappeared. As of early Tuesday morning, Eastern time, the KB article is still available, and it hasn’t been modified — it still points to the Update Catalog.

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Two weeks ago, I talked about a bug in Windows 7’s August Monthly patch rollup KB 4034664 that left many people who have two monitors reeling. After installing the security patch, the first monitor would work properly, but the second monitor could have all sorts of rendering problems.

Günter Born had a full writeup about the problem, and Christian Schwarz not only nailed the problem, but he wrote a “proof of concept” program demonstrating what was happening and when.

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It used to be that the most intrusive experience business travelers faced at airport security was a possible pat-down, or a customs check of luggage. These days, border control agents are searching passengers’ phones, tablets and laptops for … well, anything they want to see. Your complying with the request grants them access to documents, emails, passwords, contacts and social media account information. So travelers carrying confidential or privileged corporate information (in addition to the merely personal) need to take steps ahead of time to ensure that private data stays private. 

The laws around data privacy at checkpoints are murky, and border control officers in the U.S. and elsewhere have been making full use of the allowable gray areas, asking travelers to turn over email logins and social media passwords, searching devices and making forensic copies of data. If this concerns you and your company, these tips could prove useful. While legal issues vary by country, most of these suggestions will provide a measure of data security in a variety of situations.

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Wednesday night, Microsoft claims, it issued KB 4034661 for Windows 10 Anniversary Update, bringing version 1607 up to build 14393.1613. It was supposed to go out the Automatic Update chute. But as of early Thursday morning, U.S. time, nobody’s seen it. There may be a good reason why. Or maybe not. Such are the vagaries of patching Windows.

It’s a laundry-list patch, rolling out on a Wednesday (or Thursday, or …), nine days after the regular Patch Tuesday patch, KB 4034658 wiped out the Update History on many Win10 Anniversary Update machines. The KB 4034661 article lists dozens of small bug fixes (that’s “quality improvements” in Microsoft Speak).

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One week after Patch Tuesday, and would-be Windows Updaters are facing a handful of bugs. Some will find them minor annoyances. Others … not so much. Here are the known bugs, and where we stand in the struggle to resolve the problems.

Worthy of note: Microsoft is now acknowledging many bugs that in the past would’ve gone without comment. There’s hope.

Here are the known, significant buggy security patches:

• Windows 10 Anniversary Update, version 1607 – Cumulative update KB 4034658 wipes out Update History, unhides hidden updates, and effectively disconnects some updated computers from WSUS. Microsoft has acknowledged all three of those bugs in the KB 4034658 article with the usual “Microsoft is investigating this issue and will provide an update as soon as possible.”
• The first undocumented buggy driver this month for the Surface Pro 4, “Surface – System – 7/21/2017 12:00:00 AM – 1.0.65.1,” was released on August 1. It was replaced by a second driver “Surface – System – 7/31/2007 12:00:00 AM – 1.0.75.1” on August 4. The second one was documented. But then we saw four more undocumented Surface Pro 4 drivers — “Intel driver update for Intel(r) Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Generic Participant,” “Power Participant,” Processor Participant” and “Manager” — all released on Saturday, August 12. Sometime late on August 14, Microsoft posted information about two of the drivers.
• Both the Windows 7 August Monthly rollup KB 4034664 and the manually installed security-only patch KB 4034679 are causing problems with two-screen systems: The second screen starts showing gibberish with many applications, including Office. The problem has been widely reported — even replicated with a Proof of Concept program — but Microsoft hasn’t yet acknowledged it.
• The only bug reported by Microsoft in its August Windows 7 security patches is an old bug, continuing from July, in which a buggy LDAP plugs up TCP dynamic ports. That bug hasn’t been fixed.
• The Windows 8.1 Monthly rollup listing mentions a known bug: NPS authentication may break, and wireless clients may fail to connect. The solution is to manually set a registry entry on the server.

Dozens of patches were made to Office earlier this month but, so far, I’m not aware of any bugs.

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