Microsoft .NET Patch May Make PCs Go "Haywire"

yuna49 writes "Various people are reporting that the MS07-040 patch for .NET released on Tuesday can cause a variety of seemingly unrelated problems. According to the SANS Internet Storm Center 'the reports we got so far seem not to lead to any specific thing that happens in many cases, just various things going haywire.' Some commentators on The Register's report of this story indicate that the patch failed to install at all, while others report things like the mouse suddenly failing to work or long periods of hard drive thrashing. In some cases a hard reboot seems to fix the problem, but other reports suggest that a reinstallation of the .NET framework itself is required. The problems may be related to the MSCORSVW.EXE process which recompiles all the .NET assemblies when the patch is downloaded. While the recompilations are supposed to run as a background task, in some instances the recompilation will drive the processor to 100% usage."

background task & 100% CPU

[oliverthered]

A background task that's taking 100% cpu is perfectly fine, so long as it is a background task and is running on a below normal priority.

I frequently make processes that run at 100% CPU run as a background task.

Re:Sonofa...

[duguk]

Mine's been trying to install the same patch on shutdown for about 3 days now... is it related? How can I find out what its trying to install? Should I just install Gentoo again!?!

Re:Win 2k not affected?

[Bacon Bits]

No, it's just an uncommon issue. On the NT admin mailing lists I'm on, only a handful of people have reported problems. Most responses to the thread have been "1000 systems patched here, no problems reported" and the like.

The patch is also nearly 15 MB, which is huge for a patch. Some people have just been having problems with their AV scanners locking the file to scan while Automatic Updates wants to begin installing it (see MS KB 883825 [microsoft.com]). That's not a MS issue. It's arguably not even an AV vendor issue. Mostly it's an issue with admins not excluding the updates download directory.

Re:100% CPU ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is that Windows does not have an equivalent priority manager for the virtual memory system, so if the background program uses up memory, all the user apps get swapped out, the hard disk begins thrashing and the system feels slow. This isn't of course specific to windows, but at least in linux/BSD/OSX there is a way to limit the disk or swap IO.

Or maybe you can control swappiness/VM priority in Windows?

Re:Sit on it...

[myxiplx]

We typically sit on patches for a couple of months. Then we roll them out to IT, if it doesn't crash those computers we'll roll them out further. In the last two years we've only been vulnerable to a single MS advisory, and needed to patch more quickly.

How? We use group policy and IE security zones so that only sites IT have authorised can run scripts. It's about ten minutes work a week to maintain now, and while there's still some risk that a trusted site could host a vulnerability, the risk is small enough we can sleep soundly at night despite having a hundred or so workstations in an unpatched state.

The upside: Haven't had a security breach, or problem with a MS patch in two years.

.NET gripes

[Anonymous Coward]

On some computers updates always fail and I have no clue why. I have never even had the urge to go messing with .net assemblies although I admit I might have killed mscoree a time or two.

It uses rediculous amounts of disk space. Tuesdays security updates stole an additional 200+MB. This is after deleting the temp folders in the windows directory. There are some 10 copies of the same .NET crap floating around in versioned folders in the windows.

Re:Sit on it...

[hobo sapiens]

"I also would never be dumb enough to expose any microsoft machines to the internets."
Not a huge MSFT fan here, but that is a bit of an overblown statement. Just use common sense. I have a dual boot PC (XP, Feisty) and my wife uses the web all the time using XP, and I have never (I mean NEVER) had a problem.

Get a good firewall. Or, an OK firewall for that matter (I use Zonealarm). Don't use IE. You cannot uninstall it, but you can hide it pretty well so that nobody can use it. Use legitimate F/OSS (with GPL, Mozilla, BSD licenses), otherwise, grabbing all the latest "free" software is risky. If you install software and it tells you that in order for it to be installed, it also needs to install its "friends", halt the installation unless you know those friends. Stay away from warez sites, those are the dark alleys of the intarwebs.

Like I said, use common sense and you will be fine.

The biggest danger to your XP computer is not malware (assuming a certain level of proficiency here, see above). It is all of the retarded software that leaves system cruft (I call them roaches) whenever you upgrade that will slow you down to a crawl. Yes, looking at you, iTunes (about ready to roll back to version 6 here), and your stupid inbred cousin named Quicktime (must you reinstate your automatic startup every time I upgrade you? curses!). And let's not forget Office or Visual Studio, with its myriad of mostly useless startup services. I'd say it takes more knowhow to clean all that crap because retarded MSFT provides all kinds of nooks and crannies for all the damn roaches to hide in (like the registry!). That's why using Windows is a pain, not because of security problems.