Newsletter Archives

• Mysterious Windows 8.1 patch KB 4039871 making the rounds

  Posted on August 26, 2017 at 07:03 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I have no idea what it is, but there are reports of a new patch delivered on Friday night, called

  2017-08 Preview of Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems (KB4039871)

  Reportedly, it is marked important but optional. There is no KB article as yet, no entry in the list of Windows 8.1 updates, and nothing in the Microsoft Update Catalog.

  Günter Born reports that one of his readers said four of his eight Windows 8.1 systems were updated overnight. His guess is that this undocumented update fixes a bug in the Rollup Preview for September, KB 4034663, which is also officially called the ” 2017-08 Preview of Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems (KB4034663) .”

  There’s a confirming report from Japanese language site Winveg. That may be significant because the original 2017-08 Rollup Preview, KB 4034663, has a known bug “Japanese IME may hang in certain scenarios.”

  Of course, I recommend that you avoid it like the plague – let the other beta testers iron out problems with Microsoft’s patches, especially Previews like this one.

  Windows Patches/Security KB 4034663, KB 4039871

• The usual non-security update previews are out, along with three non-security patches for Server 2008

  Posted on August 15, 2017 at 16:17 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  More of the usual.

  KB 4034670 – Preview of the non-security part of next month’s Win 7 Monthly Rollup

  KB 4034663 – Preview of the non-security part of next month’s Win 8.1 Monthly Rollup

  A whole bunch of previews of next month’s .NET patches. The original announcement, KB 4035038, has been pulled, but there’s a cached copy on Google. No idea why it was yanked. (Thanks, Susan.)

  Oddly, three separate patches for Vista and Windows Server 2008: KB 4019276 (spoolsv.exe patch), KB 4036162 (WordPad crash), KB 4037616 (TLS 1.1 and 1.2 support in Server only). All optional non-security patches.

  I don’t see anything interesting. Do you?

  Windows Patches/Security KB 4034663, KB 4034670, KB 4035038