It just hasn't been a good week for me. Of course, my weekly rant about the DOT continues - they did a nice job of painting 211 and part of Long Beach Road black and putting up some traffic control barriers, but in the process have created the potential for serious gridlock. The traffic trying to turn left from LBR onto 211 is often backed up past the light one block away, and they left almost no room for cars to turn left from LBR south into Food Lion. Just wait for the summer season.
I was also fairly upset at a local rental company that ruined my daughter's vacation this summer because of a lack of a simple, common courtesy (a phone call). But, I digress.
And Microsoft has done it again. On Tuesday April 18th they released a standard monthly Windows XP fix via the Automatic Updates feature. This one was marked as very critical and I always recommend to my clients that they apply all the MS critical updates. The point is that you just can't fall out of synchronization with Microsoft - once you do that, you may not be able to get further updates. But this release had a number of bugs. The worst caused people using Outlook Express to appear to have lost their Contact list (Address Book), and to not be able to read their email.
I started receiving calls on Tuesday - the first actually came from a relative. I suggested some possible fixes, but nothing fixed the problem at that point. As you might image, other calls started coming in - I had 3 calls before 8:30 AM on Thursday. Helping clients, I found the only "fix" was to use the System Restore feature to restore Windows back to a checkpoint taken before the update. At that time, I was not yet aware that the update was the problem.
Finally, the various newsgroups on the Internet began to pick up on the situation. Although some solutions were suggested (difficult to install because they involved modifying the Registry), none seemed to work fully. Only restoring the system to an earlier date, or deleting the particular update (KB911567) via Add/Remove programs seemed to do the trick.
As of my writing this column, MS has not yet officially acknowledged the problem, nor scheduled a solution. I did read a news article on the Internet that said that MS had in fact recognized the problem and was going to issue a new fix on Tuesday April 25th but I have not seen this yet on their website.
Why did it occur? MS has been under intense pressure lately to get fixes out quickly before the bad guys exploit them. But, believe me, just knowing about a bug in your code does not make fixing it easy - it takes time and lots of testing. MS also probably has only a skeleton crew on XP as they have already missed a ship date on the new Windows Vista.
What is the lesson here? As I said, it would be a bad practice not to use Automatic Updates. So what do you do? My suggestion would be to not overreact. Most of the people I know of who had the problem went into an absolute panic when it happened and possibly caused more damage. They feared the loss of their address books or contact lists, some of which were very large. Others were unable to conduct their business due to loss of email. When these things occur, perhaps it is best to wait and search the Internet before trying all kinds of guesses (educated or not) as to what the problem might be. And, of course, good backups are important if your data is lost.
Oh and did I mention good backups?
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)