[jalind]

A heads up for all that "have Old Time Religion" about keeping up with critical updates to MS Office. The patch (MS08-014), issued last Tuesday as part of the March "Update Tuesday" critical updates to MS Office, causes math problems in Office Excel 2003 for anyone using "Real Time Data sources in Visual Basic for Applications" functions. Supposedly other versions of Excel are unaffected by this problem.

This all came to light last Thursday, and as of today there is no "fix" beyond completely restructuring how the real-time data is grabbed into the arrays to avoid the flaw this update introduced into Excel 2003. I didn't find out about it until Friday, three days after doing an "Office Update" on all my computers Tuesday evening. Fortunately for me only one machine is using Office Professional 2003 and it's the only one affected by it. All the rest are using Office Pro 2000, XP (aka 2002), or 2007 (which I don't care for that much).

Hadn't seen much mentioned about this anywhere until I spotted the PCWorld article about it:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,143467/article.html

There's also more about this problem on Microsoft:

• Original MS08-014 and its associated KB949029 bulletins with this problem amended to it (near the end):
  http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sec.../MS08-014.mspx
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/949029
• MSRC Blog Entry about MS08-014 (MSRC = Microsoft Security Response Center):
  http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archiv...y-release.aspx
• KB950340 about the problem MS08-014 is creating with Excel 2003:
  http://support.microsoft.com/kb/950340

Note that MS08-014 was identified as the most critical security update Microsoft released this time around as it patches Office Excel to plug a hole virus/worm/trojans are currently exploiting "in the wild." If you have some other version of Excel that won't suffer the problem (as in my machines with Excel in Office 2000, 2002 and Excel 2007), it should be installed post-haste. At this point, it's also on my machine with Excel 2003, but I've got the luxury of being able to use one of the others with a different version of Excel until the problem MS08-014 has created with Excel 2003 is resolved. Those who don't have that luxury will have to decide what to do if they're stuck with only Excel 2003:

1. Install MS08-014 and don't use "Real Time Data" sources until it's fixed
2. Don't install MS08-014 and rely solely on AV software so that "Real Time Data" sources can continue to be used without error

[Cookiegal]

I'll stick this for a while and close the thread.