Topic: Microsoft urged users to remove a buggy update which cause Blue Screen of Death

[Samker]

Microsoft has urged users to remove a buggy update as it yanked download links to the offending patch, after reports emerged it caused the dreaded blue screen of death.

The fixes issued on Patch Update Tuesday addressed privilege escalation bugs but an apparent font cache clearing issue lead to Windows boxes turning the colour of a clear sky.

The guilty patch run addressed 40 bugs across Internet Explorer and Windows 7 and Win 8 Pro other than Starter and Home Basic: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/MS14-043

At the time of writing, 51 pages loaded with questions and snarks about the borked updates were on an English Microsoft community forum: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_update/blue-screen-stop-0x50-after-applying-update/6da4d264-02d8-458e-89e2-a78fe68766fd

Altogether three updates were pulled for download from the Microsoft website.

The bad patch triggered crashes with a "x50 Stop error message (bugcheck)" after any of four updates (KB2982791 KB2970228 KB2975719 or KB2975331) were installed.

The other two related to problems with the incorrect location of fonts that couldn't be changed and rendering issues.

A Redmond knowledge base article explained more in depth: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791

Edward Langley, a devops bod at US consultancy Business Intelligence Goals, has written PowerShell scripts to determine if users had installed affected updates: http://nakedpowershell.blogspot.com/2014/08/four-recent-microsoft-kb-patches-can.html

(ElReg)

[devnullius]

Good ol' Microsoft: they still know how to screw things up