By Merle Nicholson, Tampa PC Users Group
merlenic@tampabay.rr.com

Perhaps you have seen recent articles on an XP update that says that Microsoft has withdrawn a security patch from its list of recommended updates. In case you want to check to see if you’re one of the 600,000 people that installed it, go to your Add/Remove Programs and check the list of updates for Q811493 Hotfix. If you have any reason to suspect that your computer is not running well since the date you installed this, you can remove it. I did – a month ago, and it made a dramatic difference. But you need to decide for yourself. There’s a revised version made available on May 28^th … read on.

This fix applies to Windows XP, Windows 2000 and NT only. It’s an update that plugs a security problem where a person can break into your computer. But in this case, the person needs to be logged on locally (actually sitting at your PC or logged in with terminal server) to do so.

The fix, when installed, apparently interacts with firewall and anti-virus software and continuously consumes some of the resources of your machine. The hotfix was originally released as a “Critical” update April 16th. Within a week, Microsoft had removed it from the “Critical” list and moved it to the “recommended” list, and as of May 27th it was removed from the updates list altogether.

That’s how I came to install it myself; I have my Windows update set to automatically download all “Critical” updates. I always read these before consenting to install. I read this one, and installed it. No reason not to, and went on with my life. Except … in mid-April I knew that my machine was running slower. I put up with it for a week, reminding myself that I need to backtrack and see what I may have done to cause this, and kind of putting it off. It was slower enough that sometimes I’d be reminded that something was wrong, but not enough to interrupt my current programming project to try to determine what it was.

And a coincidence happened. I was at my PC, contemplating a strategy to find what was happening to slow it down when I got an email from William LaMartin with a copy of an article about this hotfix that users were reporting was slowing down their PCs. So I did some news searches, came up with some newsgroup complaints, and found the hotfix number. That identified it for me in my uninstall list, so I uninstalled it, and the difference was dramatic! I had a fast machine again. I had installed it on my notebook and my Windows 2000 machine too. It didn’t seem to affect my Win2K machine adversely.

Subsequently reading the Microsoft literature in the following weeks, they were still recommending that everyone install this, but to remove it if it caused problems. Microsoft was claiming that, newsgroups complaints aside, they were receiving very little feedback on this hotfix.

So if you have Windows NT, Windows XP or Windows 2000, check your Microsoft fixes and see if you’ve installed it as I did, determine if possible if your machine is running slower and remove it if necessary.

May 28th Update ! This revised hotfix is back on the “Critical updates” list. So if you were one of the 600,000 people that installed the original release, you may want to consider uninstalling it, and reinstalling the new. If you think you need it at all, that is. Read on.

Excerpted from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-013.asp

Microsoft has corrected this problem and re-issued this bulletin on May 28, 2003 to advise on the availability of a revised patch for Windows XP Service Pack 1. u