Microsoft's April patch redux

The Redmond, Wash., software giant updated security bulletin MS06-015, which had not functioned as intentioned when combined with Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sunbelt's Kerio Personal Firewall software.

The issues were caused by the bulletin's installation of a new binary program, verclis.exe, which has been flagged by the third-party software.

The interference prevented users from opening My Documents or My Pictures folders, stopped Microsoft Office applications from responding and prevented My Documents files from opening.

Microsoft on Tuesday also released the second beta version of Internet Explorer (IE) 7. The final IE7 release is due out later this year.

Earlier this week, a highly critical new vulnerability in IE was discovered, this one caused by an error in the processing of certain sequences of nested object HTML tags, according to vulnerability monitoring firm Secunia.

Successful exploitation of the flaw, discovered two weeks after Microsoft fixed another widespread IE flaw, could lead to execution of malicious code to take over a PC.

In lieu of a patch, Secunia recommended PC users avoid untrusted websites.