News19,135 Articles

December 18, 2007

Internet Explorer crippled by Microsoft patch

Users complain about last week's security update

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld US

Microsoft is investigating reports that last week's Internet Explorer security update has crippled some users' web connection.

Users started posting messages to multiple Microsoft support newsgroups almost immediately after Microsoft released the MS07-069 security bulletin on December 11, saying that they were unable to connect to the internet, either because IE refused to open or because when it did open, it could not reach various sites.

"About 60 percent of the time, I would get an 'Internet Explorer has encountered a problem and must close' dialog," reported Bill Drake on the Windows Update newsgroup. Others echoed those comments on IE-specific forums, noting that both IE6 and IE7 balked at loading, or while loading, some pages, particularly home pages, on both Windows XP and Windows Vista machines.

Microsoft said it was on the case. "Our customer service and support teams are investigating public claims of a deployment issue with Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-069," said Microsoft's director of security response Mark Mille. "If necessary, Microsoft will update the Knowledge Base article associated with MS07-069 with detailed guidance on how to prevent or address these deployment issues," Miller added.

Other users on the support forums weren't much help, except to suggest uninstalling last Tuesday's security update. That's what Decker did. "We uninstalled [MS07-069] and have had no problems since then," he said.

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Comments received


Jorge said on Wednesday, 19 December 2007

Is this any real surprise? How many times can you patch defective code and expect it to function?

JB said on Wednesday, 19 December 2007

After updating XPsp2/IE6, IE started to show "has encountered a problem and must close" for every/any webpage ... to solve this problem I've deleted IEtemp/"userdata" folders of all users of my PC (every user has at least one... sometimes IE creates several IEtempfiles/userdata folders... )

MBF said on Wednesday, 19 December 2007

The problem seems to be with websites, that (immediately) redirect the browser to another site. A good example would be www.gmail.com which immediately redirects the browser to https://www.google.com/accounts/. At first I thought SSL (https://) was somehow to blame, but the crash also occurs with "normal" redirects.

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