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Updated Another month, another Patch Tuesday from Microsoft, but this month's bundle has come up one short from the 14 promised patches last week.

"We are committed to delivering high-quality security updates for our customers and extensively test each bulletin prior to release," Dustin Childs, group manager at Microsoft Trustworthy Computing told El Reg in a statement. "During some additional testing after advance notification, we determined one of the updates was not quite ready.

"We have not detected any attacks against this issue, or any of the others addressed today, and we'll continue to work on the bulletin and release it once it is ready, through our regular bulletin release process."

Sources say the missing patch is a .NET fix that wasn't quite up to snuff, and that it should be ready by the next patching round in October.

As for the 13 patches that are out, Microsoft rates four as critical, affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, Outlook, and SharePoint. In the latter case, the patch fixes 10 flaws in SharePoint going all the way back to the 2003 code base.

The remaining nine are all rated as important and block remote code execution, escalation of privileges, covert information gathering, and a denial of service flaw in Active Directory that can crash systems using a malicious LDAP query.

Systems administrators are (unsurprisingly) advised to patch the critical flaws first, but be warned that reboots will be required. ®

Update

Several El Reg readers have been complaining that Microsoft's quality controls might not be up to snuff, with some of the 13 remaining updates causing problems when added.

“We’ve received reports of some customers experiencing issues when deploying some of September’s Office-related updates. We are investigating this issue and will act accordingly, to help ensure that our customers are protected,” said Childs in a statement.

We'll have more details as they come in.

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