Desktop platforms Toolkit

Microsoft patches firewall problems

Published: 25 Feb 2005 09:40 GMT

Microsoft has pushed out a patch for a software bug responsible for crashing some Windows systems that had third-party antivirus and firewalls installed.

The fix, which was sent out through the automatic Windows Update system this week, deals with a problem that only affects Windows XP computers with Service Pack 2 installed alongside Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005 and Windows Server 2003. The bug causes those PCs to crash and display the Blue Screen of Death with an error message.

The issue occurs "if certain firewall or antivirus programs are installed", Microsoft said in an advisory. The company did not say which particular software was involved.

Microsoft released a patch to customers who had encountered the problem in November, after the Windows Error Reporting team noticed an increase in specific failure reports, the company said in a statement. The company then felt that the issue was widespread enough and felt confident enough in the downloadable fix to distribute it en masse through its Windows Update system.

"As we continued to get more data through the error-reporting system, we felt that it was becoming a significant enough reliability issue to provide the fix more broadly," Microsoft said in a statement sent to ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com. "As such, it met the bar for a priority reliability improvement for Windows XP SP2 users, and we made the decision to push the fix out via Automatic Update."

The software giant stressed that while it considered the update important enough to distribute to all its users, the patch does not fix any security problem. Microsoft is in the process of streamlining its update services to offer a single service to each of three classes of customers.

"This is why we encourage our customers to enable automatic updates within Windows -- so that they can receive not just security updates, but also nonsecurity-related improvements or enhancements," Microsoft said.

The company recommends that people use Windows Update to download the fix or set their system to automatically update.

Did you find this article useful?
59 out of 133 people found this useful

More In Desktop platforms

Company/Topic Alerts

Create a new alert from the list below:

Related Jobs

DESKTOP SPECIALIST- Financial Traders- London City (40-45k)

Additional knowledge of energy trading applications, application packaging and imaging, and security patch management would be useful as well as ...

IT Help Desk Analyst

To co-ordinate the communication from 2nd and 3rd line support to users managing expectations for likely fix times and call status. Some of this ...

3rd Line Support (Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, MS Exchange, AD)

You should have experience working with Active Directory, Microsoft exchange, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP and Office 2000/2003. I am looking for ...

Featured Talkback

So if you upgrade to XP SP3 you can't uninstall Internet Explorer, I'm quite sure I'm having a Deja-vu feeling about MS preventing people from uninstalling Internet Explorer in other Windows products.