Microsoft Corp., has fixed a faulty update that was pulled two weeks ago after its support discussion forum was flooded with reports of crippled computers.

The August patch was yanked after reports of it causing Windows 8.1 systems to be locked into using specific fonts. There were also more serious reports that it caused some PCs running Windows to freeze or crash, with users left staring at the infamous “Blue Screen of Death”.

Microsoft explained what happened in Security Bulletin MS14-045, which was re-published on Wednesday.

“This month we had our first roll out with additional non-security updates,” wrote Tracey Pretorius, a director with Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, in the Technet blog. “A small number of customers experienced problems with a few of the updates. As soon as we became aware of some problems, we began a review and then immediately pulled the problematic updates, making these unavailable to download. We then began working on a plan to rerelease the affected updates.”

But the updated patch won’t solve the problems by itself. The problematic patch was called “security update 2982791”, and this was pulled one week ago. The new patch is labelled “Security update 2993651”, and is meant to replace the original one. What that means is users should manually remove update 2982791 by rebooting and deleting certain files, as described here.

So unfortunately those who did install the previous patch can’t just repatch it to make everything okay. Instead, they’re going to have to wade through the system registry to delete all of the troublesome files.

“Customers do not need to uninstall the expired 2982791 update before applying the 2993651 update; however, Microsoft strongly recommends it,” says Microsoft. “Customers who do not remove the expired update will retain a listing for 2982791 under installed updates in Control Panel.”

So you don’t have to uninstall the old update, but you probably should if you want to avoid any problems down the line.

One thing that Microsoft reiterates in its blog post is that it’s now pushing out more non-security related patches alongisde the usual bug fixes on its monthly Patch Tuesday. Presumably this can be taken as a warning that bugs like this may crop up from time to time, though of course, we can assume Microsoft will do all that it can to avoid them.

photo credit: Justin Marty via photopin cc