If over the past few days you’ve been confronted with an unhealthy amount of crashes or blue-screens and recently updated your Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 system, you might have inadvertently grabbed a corrupted hotfix or two from Microsoft. The suspect files have since been removed for download, but that doesn’t help you if you’ve already applied them. Here’s how you can find out if you’re affected and if so, what you need to do.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Microsoft has listed the problem updates in a knowledge base article, KB2982791:
Microsoft is investigating behavior in which systems may crash with a 0x50 Stop error message (bugcheck) after any of the following updates are installed:
2982791 MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014
2970228 Update to support the new currency symbol for the Russian ruble in Windows
2975719 August 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2
2975331 August 2014 update rollup for Windows RT, Windows 8, and Windows Server 2012
As Edward Langley explains over on his blog, the main offender is KB2982791 itself. Fortunately, you can detect its presence with a simple PowerShell script, which Langley has hosted on GitHub.
If it turns out that you do have the update, you’ll need to go through a number of steps, including booting into safe mode, delving into the registry, deleting the Windows font cache and uninstalling all four of the hotfixes listed above.
It’s a bit of a pain, but if it solves your BSODs, it’s worth the effort.
Four Recent Microsoft KB patches Can Crash or Corrupt Your Computer [Naked Powershell, via ZDNet]
Comments
5 responses to “Find Out If You’ve Installed Microsoft’s Corrupted Hotfixes”
I tried to install the August updates manually on release after I’d run windows update, and they said they were already installed? I thought they weren’t going through windows update yet?
Either way I fortunately haven’t been getting the above errors.
Been there and had to fix it already…
Fortunately, I have a back up of my OS, but it didn’t make it any less of a pain in the arse..!
Wait, how do I use the powershell script? I don’t want to manually look at each update and check D:
edit: never mind, got it.
There’s going to be a lot of non technically minded people out there that won’t understand a freaking thing about any of these fixes, much less implement them
Updated one of my domain controllers last week which brought down AD…..Good old Windows Updates.