Microsoft moves to mute black attack over Prevx prevarication

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 02 December 2009 10:08

Opinion and Analysis

This is because it concurs that “if malware or indeed any other program modifies the shell entry to not include null terminating characters, the shell will no longer load properly, resulting in the infamous Black Screen with the PC showing only the My Computer folder.”

Prevx goes into additional detail on how Microsoft’s own ‘SysInternals’ division had discovered this “characteristic” of the registry some years ago, and following additional testing of the suspected Microsoft patches, it says that it has now “been able to exonerate these patches from being a contributory factor.”

Given that Prevx has had to apologise for any inconvenience its potential prevarication and crying of wolf may have cause, even if it was a ‘challenging issue to identify’ as Prevx says, Prevx still took the time to remind users that some who are experiencing the black screen issue could still find its fix tool could still be of use to some.

As if to underscore the continuing confusion over the issue, despite Microsoft’s move to mark malware as the malefactor of the moment, the single commenter, “Ian Samson” at the apologetic Prevx blog entry said: “I've had this issue on a couple of machines where I work, both in the last two weeks and only after windows updates, no other software changes.....

“On both boxes I reverted the OS back to before the 'Black Screen' issue using System Restore, I then applied all recent updates, one at a time - on one machine this issue returned after KB976098. The other one has not seen this issue since..... this is definitely random....”, concluded Samson.

So… as Microsoft’s colourful screens of mayhem continue maddening some users, some at the behest of malware, the best advice is to update your PC’s operating system and all software to the very latest versions and patches.

If you don’t know how, ask family, friends, get professional help or learn how to do it yourself, or consider a Mac or Linux PC instead to avoid Windows malware, but do watch out for Linux or Mac malware instead, even if it is infinitesimally miniscule in quantity compared with the Windows malware wideload!