Following Patch Tuesday this week, Microsoft pulled two updates that were causing problems. KB3011970 which addresses Silverlight and KB3004394 which addresses Windows Root certificates were both pulled after causing a variety of issues on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 computers.
Given the issues reported in Microsoft support forums and elsewhere following KB3004394 caused false UAC prompts, Catalyst driver installation fail, error 2147023113 for Windows Defender, the inability to install additional updates, and error 8000706f7 for Windows Diagnostic tool, Microsoft requested customers uninstall the patch. To follow up on this recommendation, Microsoft released KB3024777 which is a very small update. The reason it’s so small is because it is just a wrapper for the command to uninstall KB3004394.
Alternatively to the new uninstalling update, you may script uninstalling KB3004394 with this line:
[bash]wusa /uninstall /kb:3004394 /quiet /forcerestart[/bash]
The December Patch Tuesday has not been a good one for Microsoft. Several other updates are earning their share of complaints after causing various problems. KB2986475, an Exchange Server 2010 SP3 update rollup 8, was also pulled by Microsoft. KB3002339, a patch to .NET Framework 4.5.3 is hanging on install. ActiveX controls within Excel are reportedly experiencing issues after KB2553154 and KB2726958. One MVP’s blog on Excel has a solution to delete MSForms.exd to solve the problem with Active controls, “Can’t insert object” errors, or error 438.
Regarding Windows Updates, 2014 has not had a good track record for Microsoft. Hopefully things will turn around in 2015 for the sake of home users and sysadmins alike.