Windows users were delighted when Microsoft blew past its bureaucracy to deliver the patch for WMF exploits four days early.

But some who believed they had set their systems to simply download patches, then notify them to let them set their own installation schedules, had a different experience.

They were surprised and dismayed to find critical tasks, like data processing and service monitoring, had been disrupted when the systems seemingly installed the patches and reset themselves.

Microsoft’s Mike Reavey of the Security Response Center Blog responded:

I know there was a question out there about the behavior of the WMF update through autoupdate, just wanted to be clear that the update behaves just like any update released through automatic update and will respect your existing settings regarding prompting for a restart or automatic restart, depending on what you have chosen. — posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 7:16 PM by stepto

If Mike’s right, a bunch of users and admins have some work to do. We’ll give you some options later today.

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