12 New Microsoft Security Updates This Tuesday

It’s that time of the month again, the second Tuesday of every month known as “Patch Tuesday,” the time when Microsoft releases its security updates.

According to Microsoft’s website, they will be releasing 12 new security updates this Tuesday, February 12. Seven considered “Critical”, five marked as “Important.”

Critical (7) – Software Affected:

1. Windows
2. Internet Explorer
3. Office
4. Visual Basic
5. VBScript
6. JSCript

Important (5) – Software Affected:

1. Windows
2. Active Directory
3. ADAM
4. IIS
5. Office
6. Works
7. Works Suite

Happy Patch Tuesday fellow systems admins, let’s hope nothing breaks!

NBX Call Reports: Problem retrieving records from the NBX

Error message: “An error occurred while retrieving information from the NCP. There may be a problem with your network connection. Error info: [12002 - Communications error: The request has timed out.]”

I got this error message earlier while trying to download call records from the NBX. The problem turned out to be Internet Explorer 7. After uninstalling IE7 and restarting my computer, it worked! The funny thing is it worked before even when I had IE7 installed. So I reinstalled IE7 back just to make sure it’s really IE7 causing this problem and sure enough the problem came back.

This problem is actually listed in the 3Com NBX R6.0.35 Release Notes:

NBX Call Report can have problems retrieving records when it is running on a computer that has Internet Explorer 7 installed. If you experience this problem, you can uninstall IE 7 or run NBX Call Reports from a different computer where IE 7 is not installed. Note: NBX R6.0 and the optional applications have not yet been tested with IE 7. (ID 46308)

You can download the entire release notes from here: 3Com NBX R6.0.35 Release Notes

How to remove internal Excel passwords (unprotect)

This is good news for those who need to unprotect an Excel spreadsheet without knowing the password, bad news for those who actually think protecting an Excel spreadsheet is secure enough (this has only been tested on Excel files created with Excel 2003 or older).

According to this website, the passwords you enter in Excel are not used directly in protection. They are actually hashed and there are only 194,560 possible hashed values. You can then use a macro to try out all these possible combinations and a modern home computer can crack the password in seconds.

Use the free add-in below from mcgimpsey.com to remove the password for a protected Excel spreadsheet. Simply open it and you will see an extra button called “Remove Passwords.” Open the file you wish to unprotect and click the button to unlock it.

remove_internal_excel_password.xls

Here’s the macro code:

remove_internal_excel_passwords_macro.txt

Outlook 2003: The operation failed due to an installation problem

Error Message: “The operation failed due to an installation problem. Restart Outlook and try again.”

I received this error message this morning when I opened Outlook 2003 with a new user profile. It opened fine with the local Administrator account.

I checked the Windows Event Viewer and there’s a “Warning” entry there for MsiInstaller (Event ID 1004) with a description of “Detection of product… The resource ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\UserData’ does not exist.”

Doing the following fixed the problem for me:

1. Start -> Run -> type in regedit.
2. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common (or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook as others have pointed out, please check your event logs to see which one you need to select (thanks to Supercow for noticing this)).
3. (I recommend that you back up your registry first before making any changes) Right-click on Common -> New -> DWORD Value. Name it UserData.
4. Double click on the DWORD value that you just created (i.e. UserData) and set Value data: to 1.
5. Close the Registry Editor and open Outlook again.

Microsoft Launch Event 2008

Microsoft will be having launch events across the country for their three new products: Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, and Visual Studio 2008. The first one is on February 27, 2008 in Los Angeles, CA. They’ll be giving away a promotional kit with versions of all three products to those who attend.

Click here to register.

We went to their launch event last year for Vista and Office 2007 and it was pretty good. They gave away a full version of Office 2007 Professional to those who stayed until 2:00PM or so. I remember this one guy fighting with the employees there because they wouldn’t give him a copy of Office 2007 since it was too early, lol.