KB3102429

KB3102429 Re-issued, still breaking things

Things are getting a bit silly in the Microsoft patch world.

KB3102429 was originally released on November 17, 2015. It’s a very unexciting update for most people as it will “Update that supports Azerbaijani Manat and Georgian Lari currency symbols in Windows”. I’d be passing on that – but a lot of people have automatic approvals on any Windows Update relevant to their system. This is partly done because Microsoft used to be great at patching and testing; there was rarely an issue that made it’s way to the world. In the last year or so, that has definitely not rung true.

I’ve written about a few of these recently such as KB3114409 Causes Outlook 2010 to run in Safe Mode and Outlook Patch KB2956128 Breaks Profile Changing (and KB3054881) along with the apparent mismanagement of how these updates are handled from Microsoft. KB3102429 seems to be of a similar story.

When KB3102429 first came out, there were some weird problems that arose. The most common one was with Crystal Reports exporting to PDFs as well as some other programs, and other things broke too if you start digging around on Google with the KB3102429 search.

Stranger still, is that Microsoft have now re-relesaed the same KB on the 19th January 2016 with the generic expalantion of ‘Install this update to resolve issues in Windows.’ – something I’d hope all patches do :)

This now means that WSUS is aware of two patches with the same name – even more confusion!

kb3102429

I have had reports of weird Outlook visualisation problems on random computers, which has taken multiple reboots to clear. This was the only patch that was applied to the PC before the issue occured.

Without knowing what this patch does beyond the original November desription, and appearing to have no security impact – I’d suggest uninstalling. If you have any information to share on this, please do!