Microsoft Delivers a Patch to Clean-up Previous Patches

Sometimes I feel like Microsoft's Windows Update strategy could be turned into a 70's game show, called "What's in it?" and it would be extremely successful.

Imagine it:

A panel of contestants. Each given a one small clue about an unannounced, out-of-band update. The winner is the one able to piece together the hints to announce what the update is for, what it solves, and who will be affected. And, of course, the winner goes on to play for big money in the final round.

It could work. I'd love to host that show.

Detailed in a blog post by Charity Shelbourne on the Microsoft blog site, customers who had no connection to the Internet when installing the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows Server 2012 experienced failures and error messages. Eventually, the problem was discovered and as it turned out, was due to a couple updates released in August.

The updates:

KB2966828: MS14-046: Description of the security update for the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2: August 12, 2014

KB2966827: MS14-046: MS14-046: Description of the security update for the .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012: August 12, 2014

What Microsoft found is that when these updates were installed, a 0x800F0906 error would occur. When installing the .NET Framework 3.5 you must direct the installation to the source files because they are no longer available as part of the Windows Server 2012 installation files as they have been in previous versions of Windows Server. So, in effect, by having the two offending updates installed, they essentially block the ability to enable the .NET Framework 3.5 from being enabled in Windows Features.

The solution is to remove the August security updates, install the .NET Framework 3.5, and then reinstall the security updates. That’s quite convoluted and painful.

Yesterday, Microsoft made a new update (KB3005628) available that simply removes the problematic security updates for you. And, it appears the company also modified the way detection works for KB2966827 and KB2966828. Once you run KB3005628 and only after successfully installing the .NET Framework 3.5, KB2966827 and KB2966828 will once again be offered to applicable systems.

You can locate the new update here: Update for .NET Framework 3.5 on Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, and Windows 8