Time to catch up on Microsoft patches

The September Black Tuesday crop of patches didn’t cause too many headaches. I suggest you go ahead and get caught up on all of your Microsoft patches. I haven’t seen any exploits involving any of the security bulletins in September, but it’s good to get caught up before October’s Black Tuesday.

There are two known outstanding problems:

If you’re running Internet Explorer 6 (you’re up to version 8, yes?), then install MS09-045, then upgrade to IE 7 (who would do that?), you’re going to have problems. See KB 971961 for details.

If you run Windows Server 2003 or 2008, installing MS09-048 makes one command line instruction go squirrely, and IPv6 may have hiccups. See KB 966723 for details and a workaround in the Registry.

Other than that, it looks like September’s clean. Get patched now.

I’m moving us down to MS-DEFCON 4: There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented here. Check this site to see if you’re affected and if things look OK, go ahead and patch.

If you haven’t been following along here, last month I put us all the way down to MS-DEFCON 5, in an attempt to get your PCs completely patched up. For details on earlier patches, if you haven’t caught up yet, see my posting from last month. In particular, note this advice:

At this point, those of you running Vista should be absolutely convinced that you want to upgrade to Windows 7. And if you’re definitely going to upgrade to Win7, I don’t see any reason at all to install Vista Service Pack 2.