KB 2670838 - The EVIL UPDATE

This might have been the problem, this port replicator has always been a bit balky.  But I am not going to go out of my and load up MS Explorer 10 just to test it;  I use Firefox and Chrome.  Hopefully this might have fixed the every-other day freezing of the port replicator, but maybe not.  That could be caused by my Logitech sound system.   Great sound, and sub-woofer; worth at least some trouble.

Thanks,

Microsoft:

Why don't you fix the errors caused by KB 2670838 instead of having my computer re-install it as part of IE 10 without giving me any warning that it was going to do that?

This update has two effects on my system*; 1. For whatever reason, it turns the lower taskbar turquoise, 2. Explorer 9 or 10 and Chrome 25 get a 60 delay in information typed into them with internet speeds reminiscent of dial-up, while Firefox 19 ceases to function at all; The internet becomes essentially non-usable.

I wasted an entire day on this two weeks ago including an hour on the phone with one of your technicians when it was first installed.  He had no idea what the problem was and I eventually gave up and uninstalled it.  My problems ceased immediately upon its removal.

I had to go to an internet forum to learn that many people had these problems and how to set my updates to not automatically be installed.  That proved to be no help as when installing IE10 this EVIL UPDATE (KB 2670838) just re-appeared again with no notice in your description that this might happen.  Now I guess I will never install an update again since you provide no clues as to what it could do.

* My system info:

HP Envy, Windows 7 Home Premium, two screens attached using an HP usb notebook port replicator.  Buy the way, this HP port replicator is a piece of garbage that has to be rebooted (the replicator - not the PC) as it freezes once or twice a day.  But I thinks that's on HP - not you. 

What I am having a massive impact is Fraps not working correctly. It still works with flash games and other things, but now when I do the dmw (desktop option), it shows a blank screen with a glitchy cursor. Please help.

FYI:

On 11 June 2013, Microsoft released at least three (3) Optional, non-security updates for Win7 SP1 (i.e., KB2808679, KB2834140 & KB2836502), two are related to KB2670838 & one addresses an "internal URL port scanning" issue.

The problem maybe your USB port replicator (they are the worst). It has to do with the Displaylink software.  Update it to the lastest version http://www.displaylink.com/support/downloads.php.

As of this post it is at V7.2 M1.

I have found two docs one from Kensington and One usb HDMI convert with this same issue and both were fixed after updating the displaylink driver.

I know this post is older but I hope this helps someone.

This KB2670838 is pure evil. It kills Firefox. I hope somebody in European Commision will notice this recent move from Microsoft ;-).

No, actually, it doesn't do that. 

My Win 7 Pro x64 system installed KB2670838 on 27 February 2013, the day after it was released.  Because I almost never install optional updates, I assume that KB2670838 was released as an "important" update that was automatically installed.  I use Firefox all the time (currently at 21.0) and have had no problems with it. whether caused by KB2670838 or anything else, for that matter.

Plainly, there is an interaction between the files installed by KB2670838 and something else that appears to be present on many Windows 7 systems.  But the problem isn't caused by the update per se.

I have elected to block the installation of IE 10 because the computers for which I'm responsible are used on proprietary websites that often are not updated to work with the latest IE for quite a while.  Perhaps the problem is with IE 10 in combination with KB2670838.

The article that goes along with this update notes several issues, from relatively minor ("If you are a Windows 7 DirectX developer who uses the June 2010 DirectX Software Development Kit (SDK), you will have to update your development environments after you install this platform update" (a matter of updating 4 dll files) to relatively major (if you have any of a whole slew of laptops that use a combination of Intel and AMD video cards, you'll get a BSOD with stop code 0x50).