Microsoft Releases Official Statement On Faulty Patch Tuesday Update

As has been the case in the past couple of Patch Tuesday updates released this year, a few faulty and botched updates slipped through quality control at Redmond earlier this week.

News first came out yesterday that some of the fixes were causing trouble on a variety of Windows installations, from Windows XP to Vista, 7 and 8, even the various prerelease flavors of Windows 8.1.

And now the company has confirmed in a post on TechNet that the KB2817630 update that was released on Tuesday is indeed causing some issues to a number of users — an incompatibility issue with Outlook 2013 is cited as the problem.

Nevertheless, Microsoft has confirmed that it is working on a fix right now.

At the same time, it is also advising affected users to uninstall and hide the patch from the Windows Update section on their PC. A selection from the lengthy post:

“Due to a version incompatibility between outlook.exe and mso.dll, a mismatched reference to a data structure causes the ‘Minimize’ button in the navigation pane to render incorrectly, typically extremely large to the point that the navigation pane is ‘invisible’ to the user. The issue only manifests when incompatible versions of outlook.exe and mso.dll exist on the system.”

And here are some more technical details:

“If both versions are earlier (lower) than 4535.1000, or both versions are later (higher) than 4535.1000, the problem does not manifest. If one file is updated but the other is not, the problem is evident. The incompatible state is created by installing either the September Public Update OR the August Cumulative update, but not both. Users of MSI-based products that have automatic updates enabled are those that are most likely to have encountered the issue.”

The technology titan acknowledged that both the Standard and Professional Plus versions of Office 2013 are affected by this bug — but luckily all other versions of the productivity suite are in the safe zone.

Microsoft will, undoubtedly, fix and rerelease the faulty update. Stay tuned for when that happens.