Microsoft will follow last month’s record patch day with another major roll-out next Tuesday, July 11, 2006.

Microsoft says on their Security Bulletin Advance Notification site Windows users should expect to see 7 security updates: 4 will cover Windows and 3 will affect Office, the company’s industry-leading application suite. At least 2 of the 7 will be tagged as “critical,” the highest warning rank used by Microsoft.

Microsoft doesn’t disclose the exact components, services or applications to be patched prior to update delivery but both Excel and Internet Explorer have been in the news of late with multiple security vulnerabilities reported in both the spreadsheet and browser.

Microsoft says on their Security Bulletin Advance Notification site Windows users should expect to see twelve security bulletins tomorrow June 13. At least nine of the twelve patches will include fixes for flaws Microsoft dubs “critical.”

Microsoft Exchange is set to receive one patch rated “important”, while Microsoft’s Office Suite will have two patches, at least one of which is rated “critical”. Some of these updates will require a restart which is normal for the Windows Operating System. I recall Microsoft saying with the release of XP that system restarting after applying patches would be less but it seems about the same to me.

The updates tomorrow will also mark the end of a grace period for users in applying an update to the ActiveX technology.

According to many news reports, Microsoft changed the way that ActiveX elements behave in its Internet Explorer browser to circumvent a patent owned by Eolas and the University of California. Can you believe Microsoft borrowing someone elses technology? Hehe… yeah, me too.

It’s going to be a very busy day for security and IT professionals for sure. I’ve already started notifiying various clients of mine to get ready for a day of crashes, smashes and reboots.

It’s all in a day of Microsoft update Tuesday I guess but I’d much rather be at El Torito for Taco Tuesday :) eating yummy tacos and drinking a few cold ones with friends.

Microsoft says on their Security Bulletin Advance Notification site Windows users should expect to see three security bulletins on Tuesday May 9. At least two of the three patches will include fixes for flaws Microsoft dubs “critical.”

Microsoft is planning to release the following updates:

• One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Exchange. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Critical. These updates may require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.

• Note that this update will include the functionality change discussed in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 912918. Administrators are urged to review this Knowledge Base article prior to release and take steps appropriate for their environment.

• Two Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates may require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scanning Tool.

As always, Microsoft will shoot for a 10 am PDT roll-out of the fixes. Your mileage may very.

Last month, Microsoft released 5 patches that fixed 14 flaws and later in April, Microsoft was forced to re-release one of the updates because of conflicts with various Hewlett-Packard programs and older NVIDIA graphics card drivers.