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Microsoft will issue 14 security bulletins on Tuesday to plug 34 holes, including eight that are critical, in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL and Silverlight, the company said on Thursday.

“This will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions,” Angela Gunn, security response communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. “However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposures] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there’s no new record there.”

Affected software includes: Windows 7; Windows XP; Vista; Windows Server 2003 and 2008; Windows Server 2008 release 2; IE 6, 7 and 8; Office XP Service Pack 3; Office 2003 Service Pack 3; 2007 Microsoft Office System Service Pack 2; Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac; Office Word Viewer; Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel and PowerPoint; 2007 File Formats Service Pack 2; Microsoft Works 9; and Silverlight 2 and 3.

The IE, Office, and Silverlight updates fix an increasingly used type of flaw “where attackers and malware go through the installed applications rather than through the core operating system,” said Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek.

Full Story — CNET

This week brought a major update to Microsoft Office 2007 — Service Pack 2, a free download that fixes bugs, improves performance and adds a few new features in the company’s bundle of productivity applications (see my review).

This update should arrive automatically if you use Windows’ Microsoft Update option, or you can download the 290-megabyte file yourself.

The headline attraction of Office 2007 SP2 is the support it adds for some important, non-Microsoft file formats. It can read and write Open Document Format files, which may help Office users share files with people running the sometimes-unimpressive, but always free and open-source OpenOffice.org suite. Office 2007 SP2 also lets users save a copy of their work as a Portable Document Format file — a helpful feature that Microsoft had unwisely required people to install an optional add-on to use before.

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