Summary
Yesterday (August 14), many of our PW customers encountered a problem starting PartsWatch after installing MS security patches. Desktops that did not install the MS security patches did not have the issue.
One immediate solution was to uninstall the MS security patch or patches below (that might have been installed):
- Windows 10 – August 13, 2019—KB4511553 (OS Build 17763.678) Version 1903
- Windows 10 – August 13, 2019—KB4512508 (OS Build 18362.295) Version 1809
- Windows 10 – August 13, 2019—KB4512501 (OS Build 17134.950) Version 1803
- For Windows 7 the problem patch is only KB4512506.
It was completely unexpected that a MS security patch would affect PartsWatch. This is the first time in 20 years of supporting the application that we have encountered a problem as a result of a Windows security update.
We researched the root cause and created a new PartsWatch build #131 (now available via ASD or the Download Center) which is compatible with all of the MS security patches above. We recommend that all R57.3 customers upgrade to the new PW build.
We acknowledge the challenges caused for many of you yesterday and appreciate the patience you displayed during the day.
Note
This was not a new release for Windows 7 and 10, this was a security patch. We are not pre-advised of impending security patches in the manner similar to other release changes. We assume that is good security policy. There was no way we could have advised any of our accounts of an impending problem until after the security patch was installed.
Technical Root Cause Details
The Microsoft security upgrade on August 13 removed a feature of passing parameters to functions as variant arrays in Visual Basic (VB6). To work around this unanticipated Microsoft change we modified the function to copy the array to a strongly typed array and pass the copy to the receiving function. Our understanding is Microsoft has modified handling of variant arrays in Visual Basic for some unpublished security issue.