Windows Update Breaks Windows 7 Media Center Extender
Windows Update Breaks Windows 7 Media Center Extender
The second Tuesday of the month has passed and Microsoft released another round of updates, fixing some critical vulnerabilities.
A summary of the July 9, 2013 update can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-jul
It turned out that my Windows 7 64-bit WMC (Windows Media Center) PC had 17 updates available. I applied all the updates, rebooting as required, and everything seemed to be running fine.
Unfortunately, I found that two of the patches had adverse effects on my WMC (Windows Media Center) Extenders. Specifically, the Extenders (Xbox 360) would boot into Media Center and then report a “Connection Failure” , reboot into Media Center, report a Connection Failure, etc, thus rendering them unusable.
After doing a system image restore to return the PC to its pre July 9 patch state (I have been down this road before), I checked each group of patches until I isolated the two which caused the issues with my Media Center Extenders. These were KB2834886 and KB2835361; both of these patches are related to the True Type Font vulnerability. As this PC is a media server, it is never used for general web browsing, so my exposure to such an exploit should be small. I have reported the problems to Microsoft, and I will re-apply these patches when they are fixed.
It is always a good idea to do system image (or at the very least create a restore point) before apply such a large number of patches.
Shaun M
