Microsoft says “black screens” not caused by November patches

Looks like there’s a resolution to the Prevx accusation that I talked about a couple of days ago.

Paul Thurrott says:

Microsoft completed its investigation into the so-called “Black Screen of Death” that was widely reported Monday and Tuesday and has found that it is completely bogus. According to the software giant, reports of a Black Screen related to the security updates it issued in November are “inaccurate.”

“The company has found [the Black Screen] reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released [security] updates are related to the behavior described in the reports,” a Microsoft representative told me late Tuesday. “While we were not contacted by the organization [that] originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings.”

Prevx responded with its tail between its legs:

We’ve been working with Microsoft to get to the bottom of the specific black screen issues in our earlier blog.

A statement that seems to contradict what Microsoft wrote, then:

we’ve done quite a bit of testing and re-testing on the recent Windows patches including KB976098 and KB915597 as referred to in our previous blog. Since more specifically narrowing down the cause we have been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor.

So there you have it. Pure garbage.

UPDATE: Ed Bott has posted a right-on analysis of the press’s reaction to the non-event. Lots of lemmings in the PC press…

Black screens caused by November patches?

This may or may not be a Big Deal. It’s still too early to tell.

According to Prevx, a company that makes antimalware programs, something in the last set of Black Tuesday patches is causing some PCs to show a “black screen of death” – which Prevx describes thusly:

After starting your Windows 7, Vista, XP, NT, W2K, W2K3 or W2K8 PC or server the system appears normal. However, after logging on there is no desktop, task bar, system tray or side bar. Instead you are left with a totally black screen and a single My Computer Explorer window. Even this window might be minimized making it hard to see.

Prevx posted a blog provocatively entitled “Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP.” Sorry, but the minute I see a headline like that on an AV company’s blog, red flags start bouncing all over my brain.

Gregg Keizer has a much more balanced report in Computerworld. Gregg says that Microsoft has acknowledged that they’re looking into the Prevx reports. But millions? Here’s what Gregg found:

Searches of Microsoft’s support forums today, for example, turned up only one “black screen” thread with posts after the Nov. 10 security updates had been released. Four different users on that Windows 7-specific thread said that they faced a blank screen.

Anyway, there’s clearly a problem with the November Black Tuesday patches. Nobody seems to know which patch is causing the problem. And we need to wait until MS figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.

If you happen to be the victim of the “black screen” problem, apparently the free fix posted by Prevx (see the aforementioned blog) will put things right.

Stay tuned. There’s a reason why we’re at MS-DEFCON 2: Patch reliability is unclear. Unless you have an immediate, pressing need to install a specific patch, don’t do it.