KB3013455 (MS15-010) causes font corruption

Uninstall the update.

after reboot - check for updates

after many minutes get "1 important update available" (auto update is download only)

Click on the link

right click on KB3013455 and "hide update" - continue at the prompt

MS should see how many users have denied this update (if not head in the sand)

It is still their responsibility to provide an acceptable security fix (if really vulnerable)

I am still happy if some wish to live with this update - as that makes it less likely this vulnerability will be exploited - as there are fewer targets

Having trawled the web to find a solution this morning, I've had a good read through the various tos and fros and don't think I'll be repeating what anyone else has said (apologies if I am of course). Some context - I'm as close as my small office (6 users) gets to IT Support and last week I had a couple of users complaining that their screens "looked wrong" on certain software. Nothing I could see had changed in any settings so I left it as a glitch that would probably right itself. This morning I had a proper look and discovered a post on Superuser.com with a link here. I've now changed the default font on our sales software to fix the "looks wrong" problem and am contemplating tweaking the CSS on our company website so it forces the use of Verdana or Tahoma or similar on any potentially affected visitors. Anyway, my points:

Firstly, on balance I can see the lesser of two evils view of this. It's a potentially very serious vulnerability and, on balance, I'm going to leave the update installed and just tweak the affected PCs (all running Vista SP2 apart from mine which is 64bit Win7 and unaffected). Easy for me though; I only have 5 PC's to sort out, I wouldn't want to be a bigger company.

Secondly, the posting of potential problems in the KB description is all very well but it's a bit like possible side effects of medicine. If you read the notes for either properly you would never take a single pill or install a single update ever again.

Thirdly, none of my users could have read them anyway (even if they understood them) because these updates went on automatically (as recommended by MS) on shutdown Tuesday evening. What is the point of the warnings when the default, "safer" option means that you will never see those warnings?

Finally, and apologies if I am missing something really obvious here, wouldn't it be easier to rewrite the coding for the three affected fonts so that they no longer look like a badly adjusted dot matrix and offer them for download?

Just a small hint: all TrueType fonts (= most fonts on a PC) are affected. Some more, some less. Some noticably only if you make them bolder. So, the cure for some PCs indeed can be to move some editors to another font. However, it's not a general solution.

As for updates: I posted a recommendation in the course of this thread, that was true before and still is after this patch: review the patches before you install them (download automatically, but do not install automatically). (I agree, though, this won't make a difference for most people as they either won't understand or won't do it, anyway.)

Last comment (not aimed at you, but in general): it's simply impossible to have fixes without side-effects. Where are all those page-long threads where people install and install and install and install security patches year after year without a problem and would report all the attacks they avoided this way? This forum would soon become unreadable because of this swamp of positive influx, so I'm glad we don't see them. However, do please keep that in mind! Alas, as soon, as something doesn't go well this is all forgotten ...