After it just released its largest number of security fixes and patches just two weeks ago, Microsoft decided to correct several bugs in their record-breaking update via a couple of extra tweaks. During the past couple of days, the software technology giant submitted a workaround for a Windows CryptoAPI patch that had a side effect of making the Microsoft instant messenger server crash and re-released two other patches as well.

According to Susan Bradley, the Chief Technology Officer of the accountancy firm "Tamiyasu, Smith, Horn, and Braun", the present patch month doesn't seem to have any foreseeable end. She then took note that the leftover Communicator security issue was a major problem that Microsoft shouldn't have missed because the company is normally very meticulous about testing its patches with its own line of wares.

Scott Turner (the Sacramento-based Public Health Institute's Network Systems Administrator) was able to detect the abovementioned glitch immediately after installing the latest Patch Tuesday updates. According to him, nobody in their offices could connect to Communicator once the Microsoft fixes were installed.

Meanwhile, a Microsoft support article on the corporation's official website confessed that the MS09-056 patch disabled a couple of features that the Communications Server requires in order to run. The coding flaw affects the evaluation versions of Office Communicator 2007 and the full versions of Office Communications Server 2007 and Live Communications Server 2005.

Furthermore, Microsoft published a follow-up workaround that bypasses the patch problem, even though Turner himself hasn't checked it out at the time of this writing. The administrator has instead disabled the latest MS09-056 patch for the moment in order to keep his company's Communicator applications running smoothly.

There was also one other patch that Microsoft fixed during the last few days. According to Eric Schultze (an independent security specialist), the August-released MS09-043 Office update wasn't configured properly, which was why the clients who utilized Microsoft update software such as WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) received poor or failed scan results. Therefore, the customers using these tools may think that they're updated and protected, but are instead vulnerable due to this faulty patch.