17 epic Windows Auto Update meltdowns

I still cringe whenever I read the admonition that everyone should turn on Windows Automatic Update.

While it’s true that your Great Aunt Mable’s PC should be set to update automatically, most experienced Windows users — certainly, everyone advanced enough to be reading this missive — should set Windows to “Notify but don’t download,” and wait until the Black Tuesday wails have passed every month.

I wrote about the worst Automatic Updates of 2012 earlier this year, and picked five real stinkers. This time I go back a little farther and show you my favorite automatic fumbles of all time.

In the same Black Tuesday batch as the preceding screw-up, Microsoft released MS06-016, a patch for Outlook Express.

Unfortunately, many OE users reported that, after installing the patch, they couldn’t open their address books; some said they completely lost all their contacts; and still others said they couldn’t send or receive any mail.

Knowledge Base article 917288 gives the nine-step manual fix-it procedure: uninstall the patch, copy a WAB file (or files — it’s complicated), go to a command prompt and delete the original file, start OE, and manually import the copied WAB file. All in all, it was a fitting punishment for turning on automatic updates.

Over and over again, we saw botched .Net patches — some refused to install, others left .Net dead, others clobbered programs that relied on .Net. It started in January 2009 with a patch that claimed to push .Net Framework 3.5 to Service Pack 1, but didn’t.

Another patch, in March 2009, also identified as .Net Framework 3.5 SP1, installed .Net Framework 2.0 SP2 and .Net Framework 3.0 SP2 as well. It was an unholy mess that had us going in circles for months.

We saw many more .Net patching problems in 2010 and 2011, all compliments of automatic update.

Just before tax day — tell me if this is starting to sound familiar — Microsoft released MS12-025, yet another botched .Net patch.

(For the sake of brevity, I didn’t bother to list separately MS10-070, MS11-039, MS11-044, MS11-066, or MS11-069, all of which were incredibly botched .Net patches.)

This particular patch kept TurboTax from printing tax forms. On tax day. #fail

Once again, Microsoft threw a bunch of machines into a tizzy by releasing a nonsecurity patch on the fourth Tuesday of the month — and sending it down the automatic update chute.

This time, KB 2670838, a “Platform Update for Windows 7 x64-Edition” messed with IE9 so badly that it would put a black bar on the right side of the screen. Click on the bar, and your PC died with a blue screen.

Fortunately, the fix is to uninstall the bad patch.

That brings us to this month and what a crop of bad patches we saw. Within 48 hours of the month’s Automatic Update, Microsoft publicly admitted six Windows patches were bad and pulled four of them. As far as I can tell, that’s a record — and I’ve been watching Microsoft patches for more than a decade. It’s not just a record for bad patches. It’s a record for how quickly Microsoft acknowledged, documented, and in some cases, pulled the offending patches.

If Microsoft continues to come clean with its screw-ups — hardly a given — those of us who wait for patches will have a much easier job stalling on the stinkers.