Replies

Susan,

Warning: Office Updates (Office 2016 C2R 2106 Build 14131.20278) – available Friday July 2 – might have broken some Access Database connections. In particular this VB.NET command

Dim DBEngine As New AccessDAO.Dao.DBEngine

used to work Thursday, now it does not! (The code simply does not continue…)

We have not had time yet to figure out why or what the workaround might be.

Highly recommend disabling Office updates!

Argh!

[Moderator edit] removed HTML. Please paste using the “paste as plain text” option after a right click, or change to the Text tab to paste

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

Windows Defender has been giving us a rash of false positives recently. Starting about a month ago December 2020, typically emailed attachments that are encrypted zips with a variety of contents (source code, text files, exes, dlls) These have been getting tagged as threats and are quarantined. We can get them back by restoring them from quarantine, but false positives are very bad. They lead people to believe that Windows Defender is not finding real threats – like the proverbial boy who cried wolf.

Some of these encrypted zips are sent to everyone in the company – and only a few machines will tag the zip as malware.  The rest are perfectly fine with the file. In the case of  files sent to only one person, they can be independently retrieved from the email server and submitted to VirusTotal – and nothing else sees the file as malware.

Better yet, any available update to the definitions will typically cause the offending encrypted zip to be allowed/passed as safe.

It seems that Microsoft Defender has become unstable. Are they looking for shorter contiguous chunks of the files for the signatures? Anyone have any idea what is going on?

We’ve been sending each other encrypted zips for decades, and using Windows Defender for at least 5, maybe 10 years.   What has happened?

Deuxbits

 

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

Susan Bradley wrote:

Just a reminder.  Today is the day.  Usually about  10 a.m. pacific time is when I turn in my chair to look to the north (Redmond is located to the no
[See the full post at: MS-DEFCON 2: Windows and Office patches out Nov 10]

One request – please inform us of known/reported issues with the current patches/updates. If not please supply a link in the notice of a URL we can go to see these reports. Normally in the subsequent posts we could see some reports of potential issues showing up in Microsoft’s canon fodder.

And Congratulations! I’ve been a fan for years. Very happy to see you in-charge at this site.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

I just updated a machine with Office 2010 Pro (MSI) with four 2019-02-05 updates and I can confirm that these updates did not change/update MSCOMCTL.OCX. The version of MSCOMCTL.OCX is still 6.01.9864 as it was before.

These 2019-02-05 Office 2010 (32bit) updates are:

KB4462172

KB4462187

KB4462182 (Outlook)

KB3115314 (Visio)

I have also checked Office Pro 2013 C2R and Office Pro 2016 C2R machines for Office updates a few minutes ago 2019-02-06 15:00 GMT and neither of these machines are seeing updates yet. However I’ve found C2R updates tend to run a bit late in the update cycle.

You can check Office 2013 C2R latest version history here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-2013

Which is consistent since it has not been updated since 2019-01-08

And Office 2016 C2R latest version history here (if you can figure out the mess that is a C2R Office365 and Office 20xy channels and “version”):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office365-proplus-by-date

Which has not been updated since 2019-01-31 and appears to indicate that there is a only a “new” version 1901 in the Monthly Channel.

 

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

2 users thanked author for this post.

woody, abbodi86

Unfortunately no, you may need to be concerned about the issue. Many third party programs utilize the Microsoft lightweight database engine (Jet) that is associated with Microsoft Access. You may not have or use Microsoft Access directly but you may have a third party program that utilizes that underlying database engine and the older Access database file formats that it utilizes.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

Although the MS note does not mention this, the bug also affects Access 95 format files as well. Furthermore, if the program attempts a compress/repair of these older format database files any tables containing field names longer than 32 characters will be deleted! This is otherwise know as data corruption.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

Thank you Noel. I generally agree. One more peculiar note about the update. Removing it did not fix the problem… :-0

We have always had plans to move to move to VS2017 but we are ultra careful about changing production tools and since we rarely have a week go by without publishing an update to our software this makes roll out and testing of a new production tool a bit more of a task which has to be carefully scheduled. This incident has encouraged me to increase the priority of that roll out schedule. Of course many of our self developed build automation tools will need to be updated/modified since Microsoft radically changed the location of the build tools pattern for version 15, for example; “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\MSBuild\15.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe” versus “C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe” :-D. Reports from reliable developers do not indicate anything has been broken by VS2017 so the new proposed roll out schedule will be discussed today.

I also worry about the more frequent updates to VS2017 (now up to 15.8.2) and the increased load that will incur on our production tool testing in the future.  Also the inevitable kibitzing from already overworked developers having to relearn modified features, layout, etc. :-D. When can we all stop repeating the mantra “Agile is better” for everything? Doesn’t Microsoft’s Windows 10 new six month update frequency provide some data to contradict this?

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

I and others in our organization have seen this extraordinary delay on multiple machines this past week – longer than 8 hours on multiple machines. Patience worked, but wow it was hard. I’m sorry I just read this work around regarding doing KB 3145739 first 🙂 Thank you for the tip Susan Bradley. (Easily 50% of the reason I subscribe to WindowsSecrets)

I wanted to suggest another possible solution for this problem – one that might work all the time – this is not based on extensive testing, only an observation while testing Powershell’s capabilities at managing the Windows Update process on one machine. I used a powershell script library Windows Update Powershell Modules recommended at “The Scripting Guy” blog Use a PowerShell Module to Run Windows Update. I can only say that in my first test the process was remarkably fast. Note that control of KB installation order may not be as easy with this method. For Windows 7 you will probably need to install the Windows Management Framework 4.0 which updates Powershell to version 4.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

I consider this a (major) flaw in Microsoft’s Windows Image backup. For Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008R2, Windows Image Backup cannot backup onto a “large” disk formatted using “Advanced Format” where the bytes per sector is 4096B (or higher)
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsbackup/thread/889b01be-d333-4fc7-b005-e12b7b236ad7

Advanced Format is typically used on large disks – larger than 2.2TB (and many smaller solid state drives). If the disk supports 512e (512B per sector emulated) then Image Backup will work but with a performance penalty…..

A few details: I have been using two (A,B) external 3TB disks (Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex) to backup some Win2K8R2 servers using Windows Image Backup and store them remotely – I had been doing this successfully with the disks mounted and shared on a separate machine and that shared disk seen by the servers Image Backup as a “remote shared folder” No problems – GigE network connections and multiple simultaneous backups got the job done quickly and with little pain. Sweet.

Imagine my surprise at the failure of Windows Image Backup when done directly (plugged into the USB port on the Win2K8 server) onto the external drive. The backup looks like it is going to work, creates the WindowsImageBackup directory and various sub-directories, but as soon as it goes to create the first backup image (.vhd) file it fails. Peculiar…..

The error message is a bit obscure (and misleading)
“One of the backup files could not be created. Detailed Error: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”

In the system event log:
Backup started at ‘-date-‘ failed with following error code ‘2155348010’ (One of the backup files could not be created.). Please rerun backup once issue is resolved.

Multi-hour chkdsk /f/r turns up nothing wrong with the disk. Direct Image Backup onto a smaller <2TB external (USB) disk works perfectly.

A little more research turns up the 4096B per sector "issue" with Windows Image Backup.
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsbackup/thread/5d9e2f23-ee70-4d41-8bfc-c9c4068ee4e2
and the one above.

Personally I find this ridiculous. How does Microsoft sell Windows Server 2008 R2 as a solid enterprise ready product if one cannot do an image backup of a large system onto a large drive using their built in tools? 😡

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun

I don’t understand why you (suntower) think Eudora 7 is awful in Windows 7 64. I also (as others here have reported) use Eudora 7.x on a Windows 7 Pro 64bit machine with almost zero problems. There is only one problem I’ve observed that is unique to Windows 7 – mostly cosmetic – it does not display font spacing correctly in the editor (new mail or reply, etc). I do not use the standard Windows directories for my mail folders and sub folders. I also don’t use the initial settings from Eudora 4 which placed the mail folders in the Program FilesEudora directories. Placing these files into a shared folder for access from other machines should be (I have not done it…) no problem.

Based on your experiences, particularly the failed import problem, I’m wondering if you have tried compacting your mailboxes BEFORE attempting to do the import. It is possible with program crashes etc. that you have a corrupt mailbox somewhere and the import failed as a result.

One particular action that I’ve found is almost guaranteed to crash Eudora, in Windows XP or Windows 7, is to click on an an html/URL link in an email (to open the link in a browser), then attempt to do something else in Eudora BEFORE the browser comes up and returns “success” to Eudora. Don’t do that. (Easy to do on a slow machine) On my older Windows XP machine this is too easy to mistakenly do. On my newer faster Windows 7 machine – it’s much hard for me to screw up.

There are several features of this eMail client that I would be very unhappy without. I’ve been following the development of Eudora 8 from Mozilla in the hopes that a stronger client would result. I’d love to see a better filter organizer/editor. I have a great number of filters that I do not want to loose.

I strongly appreciate the two suggestions for similar alternate clients – Incredimail and MailForge. I will have to investigate these further. Thank you.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing - Werner Von Braun