Summary: UPDATED. Buggy updates are certainly a problem, but the company's poor communication of the problems is an even bigger cause for concern.
It's been a long time since Microsoft had a Patch Tuesday this bad. By Friday they were conceding problems with several updates. Not only did
they withdraw four updates, but they recommended that users uninstall one of them.
Yesterday
they reissued that update, but they also announced that it had its own set of new bugs, one of which can make windows inaccessible or invisible. Three of the four withdrawn updates are still withdrawn and two of those are also subject to the missing window bug. Two other updates, previously uninvolved with the August updates, also have this missing window bug.
I have no hard numbers to go on, but I do suspect that the number of users affected by all these problems is, as Microsoft says, small. Perhaps very small. Even so, it's hard to escape the feeling that something went very wrong recently at Microsoft's update shop.
