Bug in DRM Gets December Silverlight Patch Pulled

Patching folks, when's the last time you were able to breathe a sigh of relief after a Patch Tuesday release? More and more problems are mounting over this month's releases. I'm keeping a tally in this article: Tracking December's Updates: Update KB3008923 Crashing IE9, Other Issues Reported.

Each month, we've been faced with updates that break things. Microsoft eventually pulls the more suspect updates and later states that the problems only affect a very small percentage, but so it is, and so it goes. The sad fact is that as each month's update woes stack up it makes it easier for Microsoft customers to consider migrating to a non-Microsoft OS. Every OS has to be patched, but someone, somewhere, has to be hitting a better success percentage that we've experienced in the last couple years from Microsoft. The problem seems to be growing steadily worse.

Yesterday, another update hit the community headlines. KB3011970 is (was) an update for Silverlight. Over the course of yesterday afternoon, many patchers were finding that the update was slowly disappearing from their patching mechanisms like WSUS and System Center Configuration Manager. And, while not officially stated by Microsoft yet, it does appear that this update has been pulled.

Some that experienced problems noted that navigating web sites that required Silverlight was difficult, while others reported that updating the Silverlight Player halted all video playback. A thread on the TimeWarner Cable web site tells its customers how to uninstall the update, go back and install the previous version, and then how to block this month's update from ever appearing again.

A thread on the Microsoft forums confirmed that the update has been expired.

Someone at Microsoft has to be hearing about these things, right? Heads need to roll before this gets fixed, it seems. It's actually becoming easier to predict bad patches than it is to predict bad weather.