Four Recent Microsoft KB patches Can Crash or Corrupt Your Computer

Microsoft recently announced (Mid August 2014) that some of the recent KB patches released to the public are causing corruption and crashes of many computers.

The most serious KB is KB2982791

MS14-045: Description of the security update for kernel-mode drivers: August 12, 2014

From <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2982791>

The other three KBs are:

• KB2970228
• KB2975719
• KB2975331

I have posted the following PowerShell script to help you quickly identify if your computer has any of these four KBs installed.

If you do have any of these four KBs installed, please read the mitigations steps listed in the KB articles.

Tip: You might want to create a restore point before removing the KBs, as a fall back just in case…

Here is what my output looks like:

It appears I have to uninstall KB2982791 !!

Here is an article from ZDNET on the situation:

Microsoft pulls updates, recommends uninstall

From <http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-pulls-updates-recommends-uninstall-7000032678/>

I borrowed the script from ScriptingGuy Ed Wilson and made a few changes.

Use PowerShell to Easily Find Information About Hotfixes

From <http://blogs.technet.com/b/heyscriptingguy/archive/2011/08/22/use-powershell-to-easily-find-information-about-hotfixes.aspx>

If you have many servers to check, you can always get a list of servers from a text / CSV file and add the ComputerName parameter.

DSC Bucked Me Off and I Regrouped

PowerShell DSC Tip

At times DSC can be like trying to rein in a wild bronco, learning how to control it, without it getting skittish. 

I recently wasted a ton of man hours when I tried creating a new DSC resource.

Every time I made a change to the resource in an iterative cycle, I had some simple tests that failed over and over.

I triple checked the code, and tried everything short of reinstalling PowerShell.

TIP: Unless you tell DSC otherwise, it will cache your resource when you run it, for speed purposes. This means when you modify the resource, it does not "take" unless you get DSC to reload the cache. To do that, you turn off the caching by using DebugMode in the LocalConfigurationManager.

Debug Mode in Desired State Configuration

From <http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2014/04/22/debug-mode-in-desired-state-configuration.aspx>

LocalConfigurationManager{ DebugMode = $true }

From <http://kevinmarquette.blogspot.com/2014/06/localconfigurationmanager-debugmode-true.html>