November 8th, 2005
The World’s Smallest Patches
By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Today is Patch Tuesday — the second Tuesday of the month, when Microsoft releases its patches. As usual, I checked the Windows Update site at around noon to update all my PCs (I have my PCs set to download, but not install automatically … and frequently logging into the Update site beats the auto download, at least in my experience).
I had trouble with a couple of Office 2003 patches and couldn’t figure out why. The security patch downloaded OK, but the Office patches would not. It wasn’t until I expanded the views on them that I saw why.
Zero-byte patches. Can’t be any smaller than that. Happened on more than one of my PCs, too … and despite trying it over and over again, I never got a different result.
Update: Still had the same result the next day. Despite not being able to search for the patches on Microsoft’s site, by drilling down into the patch details and following the links, I was able to find the real patches and download them individually.. The KB907417 patch, for example, was 299K when I found the proper link.
We Say: It’s not really harmful, just humorous … and annoying. Especially in light of the stories over patch issues from last month’s Patch Tuesday. Interestingly, I did searches on the KB numbers on the U.S. Microsoft site and found nothing. I also Googled them and found references on what appeared to be a Danish (?) site.
David Johnston says:
It must have been a glitch. The corresponding patches I’m seeing are a little larger
November 8th, 2005 at 2:21 pm
John Tidball says:
RE: Patches. I have some patches that autodownloaded awhile back, and everytime I get ready to de-boot the ‘puter, in the shut down window, it appends the ’shut down my computer’ with something about it will install the updates, but if I just click
Shutdown, it runs for quite awhile, but never installs them.
I’ve right clicked on the shield and ! in the quicklaunch, and tried to manually install them. Never works.
I hope these aren’t important patches hanging around, or that
they have installed and don’t realize it. Frustrating.
November 8th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Son Phan says:
Did you see the (Downloaded; ready to install…) comment right below? That means either the “Auto Update” service already downloaded the update or you either run update and downloaded them before, but failing to install or did not confirm to install them. 0kb means you have 0kb left of that update to download (or basicly you did download them all but not install yet).
Specially for Office 2003 updates, make sure you go to Run- type in msconfig, press enter, go to services tab, look for Office Source Engine and make sure it checked to be able to update.
I am not a Microsoft big fan but anyway I respect their efforts, and as long as i’m still using Microsoft products, i’ll be a part of their users
Just a quick help and my 2 cents,
Son Phan
November 9th, 2005 at 7:32 pm