Microsoft has announced that they’re now going to release patches for their Windows OS on a monthly basis as opposed to releasing them as soon as they are developed as they had previously. This is mainly to address complaints from businesses over the near-constant rate of releases for patches. The first of these monthly releases happened yesterday and the Windows XP version consisted of five or so patches addressing buffer overflow problems. I let XP download and install the patches on its own and then sat down to play a little Dungeon Siege.

Imagine my surprise when DS locked up as soon as I launched it before it even got around to displaying the Microsoft animation. I killed the process and tried again. Another lockup. I killed the process, rebooted and tried again. Another lockup. WTF? So I re-installed Dark Age of Camelot cause I’d been talking with friends who still play it and figured I’d give it another go-round. Launched the game and it patched itself and allowed me to reopen my old account on the game and when I told it which server I wanted to play on it proceeded to lockup while launching the game client.

Apparently these security patches are so secure that they prevent the running of a couple of my games. So I did a system restore to the day before and afterward both DS and DAoC ran just fine. So I guess I won’t be applying the latest round of critical patches until someone figures out why this is happening and comes up with a fix for Microsoft’s fix. What fun.

Hopefully this will be just one more reason for game makers to start writing for Linux soon so I can dump this crappy OS and use something worthwhile for a change.

Followup: Looks like Microsoft has gotten enough grief over security issues lately to push up the release date of Service Pack 2 for XP to this December.