Microsoft denies blame for 'black screens of death'

From InfoWorld: Microsoft has denied that its November Windows updates are causing a widespread "black screen" lock-out of users' PCs.

"Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that are resulting in system issues for some customers," Christopher Budd, Microsoft's security spokesman, said in an e-mail. "The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behavior described in the reports."

The report Budd referred to stemmed from a blog post by U.K.-based security vendor Prevx last week that claimed recent Windows updates changed Access Control List (ACL) entries in the registry, preventing some installed software from running properly. The result, said Prevx, is a black screen, sometimes dubbed "black screen of death" in an allusion to the "blue screen of death" that Windows puts up after a major system crash.

Since that initial report, Prevx has called out a pair of updates, one in late November and the other from last July, as the cause of the black screen lock-out.

"The conditions under which the actual black screen is triggered are spasmodic," admitted Dave Kennerley of Prevx's support team in an update to the original blog post of last week. "Some test systems always trigger the condition, others are less consistent. The windows patches which seem common to the issue arising are & KB915597 and KB976098 ."

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