Microsoft urges customers to uninstall 'Blue Screen of Death' update

The update, identified as MS14-045 in MicrosoftMicrosoft's numbering, was one of nine released on "Patch Tuesday," Aug. 12, was designed to fix three separate flaws, including one related to a font vulnerability and another in the Windows kernel, the heart of the operating system. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Within hours of its release, however, users reported that MS14-045 had generated a Stop 0x50 error on some systems, mostly on Windows 7 PCs running the 64-bit version of the OS.

"Installation went smoothly. After rebooting everything worked fine. But when I shut down my notebook and switched it on a little later it came up with a blue screen with a Stop 0x50 in Win32k.sys. I could not even boot into safe mode as Windows failed to start no matter which mode chose," wrote a user identified as "xformer" to start a now-long thread on Microsoft's support discussion forum.

As of Sunday, the thread contained nearly 380 messages and had been viewed almost 50,000 times. The latter is a large number even for Microsoft's support forum, and hints at the scope of the problem.

Others on that same discussion thread pointed to different updates issued the same day that caused identical problems, including one meant to support the Russian ruble symbol.