MS: IE Patch Causing Browser Crashes

Microsoft acknowledged Wednesday that a glitch in its patch intended to fix several security vulnerabilities within Internet Explorer may cause the browser to crash when visiting certain Web sites. According to the company, the issue occurs when running Internet Explorer 6 SP1 on either Windows XP or Windows 2000.

Microsoft also said that the bulletin would be re-released on August 22 along with a patch to correct the problem. The company has provided a hotfix in the meantime for affected customers to use until the new patch is ready.

IE6 crashes when a site that uses the HTTP 1.1 protocol and compression is visited, the company said in an advisory. Issues have been reported in various customer relationship management (CRM) applications, including those from Microsoft itself.

"Since MS06-042 resolves a number of security vulnerabilities we recommend customers continue to deploy the update," Microsoft Security Response Center researcher Mike Reavey said.

The problems with the Internet Explorer patch is not the first time that Microsoft has had to deal with secondary issues caused by its fixes. In April, it had to reissue a patch because certain NVidia and Hewlett Packard printer drivers were incompatible with the update.