As I mentioned earlier this morning, Microsoft has pulled the botched patch KB 3004394. That's the Windows Root Cert patch causing endless problems -- Windows Defender wouldn't start, installing KB 3004394 blocked installing other Windows Updates, UAC prompts appeared in the weirdest places, MSE wouldn't install, VirtualBox stopped working, and on and on.
In the past hour, Microsoft acknowledged the problem and told us what to do about it. Microsoft engineer and forum moderator Pinaki Mohanty, writing on the Microsoft Answers forum, announced that you should uninstall KB 3004394, if you were unfortunate enough to get it. Here’s the official advice:
We encourage Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 customers who are impacted, to uninstall the updates/KB3004394. Once ready, we will re-release the updates.
I don't think they do - they can't, at least not to the level they should/need to. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing such big blunders so often by so many.
Apple (iOS8), Piriform (monitoring), Samsung (EVO callback) just to pick some recent ones.
Big companies (OK maybe Piriform isn't in the Apple stratosphere of companies) making stupid decisions.
Having been a coder, project leader, systems tester and oncall support for a few large companies I can tell you the testing of new releases was phenomenal, and being human, if something did creep through, man did we get a red hot poker up the jacksie or what!
I'm currently getting destroyed by post-update regret. Trying to launch the shell (explorer.exe) brings up a box that says "unknown hard error" and I haven't been able to fix it yet. Seemingly related to Windows Updates, since that was the last thing I did before it began.
I'm currently getting destroyed by post-update regret. Trying to launch the shell (explorer.exe) brings up a box that says "unknown hard error" and I haven't been able to fix it yet. Seemingly related to Windows Updates, since that was the last thing I did before it began.
Uninstall the KB3004394 update id installed on Win 8.1 (you never know even though the problem seems to only affect Win 7).
Absolutely incredible. I recently read that Microsoft was on track to make nearly $60 billion dollars in gross income in 2014. Perhaps they should invest just a wee bit more of that money in the Quality Assurance department.
They'd probably need to build that department first! Seems every few months there's an update that causes issues, this latest one seems very serious.
Which reminds me of something Hazelnut has mentioned in the past when she says she waits a few days before applying updates - very wise!!!
Ever since the last great update debacle in August 2014 I make it a point to create a backup image of my Windows 8.1 system on the weekend prior to update Tuesday. I learned that lesson the same way I learned nearly everything else I know about computers - the hard way.
I looked at my recent super update and it showed the bad one installed and also the remedy one installed. I looked to uninstall the bad one and it's not on the list so I'll assume the fix did its job. No problems here. (knocks on sequoia tree)
Nope, but it's trivial for me to reinstall Windows if need be. I'll probably try fixing it for the next week or so until i get frustrated enough to wipe