First Round of Windows 2000 Patches Released

Microsoft has already released its first batch of Windows 2000 (Win2K) patches, only days after the release of Win2K. The patches include one Critical Pack with several fixes and two non-critical patches: one fix for an incompatibility with Adobe FrameMaker, and one fix for an incompatibility with Iomega Jaz and Zip drives. All patches apply to all released versions of Win2K products: Windows 2000 Professional (Win2K Pro), Windows 2000 Server (Win2K Server), and Windows 2000 Advanced Server (Win2K AS).The Critical Update pack, released 3 days after Win2K, contains three patches: - One patch fixes a VBScripting problem with non-Gregorian calendars. Unpatched systems report the date incorrectly when using the Japanese Wareki calendar or the Taiwanese calendar. - One patch fixes a problem with saving .html files from Office 2000 programs. Microsoft has pushed its Office 2000 and Web integration fairly hard. Office suites need to generate Web pages quickly and easily by saving files in .html to an HTTP server. Unpatched systems have file-corruption problems when trying to save documents this way. - One patch fixes a security hole called the Malformed Hit-Highlighting Argument Security Vulnerability. In unpatched systems, a hacker coming into a server through HTTP can gain access to local files if the Web server is running both Web services and file-indexing services. Microsoft also released two individual patches: - One patch resolves an incompatibility between Win2K's PostScript drivers and Adobe FrameMaker 5.x. Unpatched, FrameMaker 5.x can't save PDF files when running on Win2K because of this incompatibility. - The other patch resolves an incompatibility between Win2K and Iomega tools associated with Iomega storage products such as the Zip drive and the Jaz drive. In unpatched systems, Iomega tools can't recognize parallel-port drives. A list of all patches with downloads is available on Microsoft's Web site.