"The rest of the updates apply to more technically inclined users. The most serious is the patch for a Windows 2000 component known as Microsoft Agent"

The MS Agent subsystem is installed by default, and it's what controls the animated paperclip/cat/dog/whatever in MS Office.

If you have any version of Office since 97 installed, or IE, you'll need the update.

Only if you're on 2000 because the ActiveX control is from a different development line. I think it's fair to say that 2000 users will be techies, especially now that M$ are quite effectively forcing every new hopeful Windows punter to avoid the goodness and go straight for the bloat with just enough temptation to make it worthwhile. I, like our reporter, only had the Malicious Software Removal Tool to (well, not exactly - it just runs the check and sets a regkey to prove it's done it) install on XP.

Cheers,

Sabahattin

Quite the reverse, I think these people are to be amongst the least technical - they will be those with old / handed-down PCs which they are happy to use.

These patches always seems to occur on Wednesdays. Is the American for 'Tuesday' now 'Wednesday' ?

The American for Tuesday has been Wednesday ever since the Atlantic opened up a few million years ago. The good news is that once the Pacific closes, it will be Monday, but by then I expect there will be no bugs left in Windows.

I think not. My wife's employer (who have one of the most ridiculous IT policies I've ever heard) still runs Windows 2000 on all desktop PCs. Their "policy" is not to upgrade until a new version with a service pack is out, and only then to upgrade to the version before that, i.e. when Vista SP1 comes out they'll finally upgrade to XPSP2 (or SP3?). I'm all for not paying MS to beta-test their software, but XPSP2 has been "stable" for years now...

The patches generally become available in the U.K at around 8-9 P.M which is approx when the workers in Redmond will be turning up to work on tuesday morning.

I run 3 Windows 2003 Servers and 1 Windows 2000 Server on our network. For each of them, last month's patches required a reboot - and all 4 failed to reboot successfully.

The W2K server hung during shutdown. After an hour of trying everything (including rebooting via Dell OpenManage) I was forced to power-cycle the machine.

One of the W2K3 servers rebooted - but had to be rebooted again before it would work. The other 2 had to be manually rebooted when the WUPD reboot failed to actually reboot.

Maybe THIS was Skype's problem? Multiple servers locked up on reboot.

If you don't have Crystal Reports installed, the update will install again... and again... and again

Lots of people reporting this issue:

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2127399&SiteID=1