Microsoft releases updates for Windows NT 4

Microsoft in a rare gesture released certain critical patches for their ancient Operating System in Windows NT4. They had officially ceased to support this aging OS in December last year. They issued patches to fix two critical bugs in NT4. These were included in the recent Microsoft Security Bulletin, which has now become a monthly feature from the software giant.

Microsoft critics might be surprised at this development as Microsoft rarely goes out of their way to issue fixes. Especially to unsupported platforms. Microsoft had explanations for them as well. The company said in the press release that the developers had worked a lot on these patches before the year ended. Therefore, they decided to release the patches anyways.

The company however warns that these undue favors would not continue in the future and corporates should consider moving on to their new offerings, which are supported actively by the company. Microsoft still however reserves the right to continue offering patches if they so desire. And critics believe that major critical flaws might still get unscheduled fixes considered the popularity of the older NT versions.

The patches takes care of recently discovered bugs in Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1, running on NT4, Windows 2000 SP3 and SP4, Windows XP SP1 and SP2, Windows 2003 and Windows 98/Me. It fixes a flaw discovered in ActiveX HTML help component in Internet Explorer. The second bug is related to how Windows handles the cursor and icon format.