Security company PrevX reported Windows lock ups to a black screen – and the news swept the planet, not least because of the ‘black screen of death’ label.

However, PrevX has been forced to apologise for the blog that started it all after Microsoft found inaccuracies in its findings.

Inaccurate reports

"Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that that are resulting in system issues for some customers," said Microsoft.

"The company has found those reports to be inaccurate and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released updates are related to the behaviour described in the reports."

"While we were not contacted by the organisation who originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings. Our support organisation is also not seeing this as an issue.

"The claims also do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or KB articles."

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Microsoft is investigating reports that its latest release of security updates is resulting in system issues for some customers,” said a company spokesman in an e-mail Monday. “Once we complete our investigation, we will provide detailed guidance on how to prevent or address these issues.”

The reports Microsoft alluded to stemmed from U.K.-based security vendor Prevx, which claimed last Thursday that the Windows security updates issued on Nov. 10 changed Access Control List (ACL) entries in the registry, preventing some installed software from running properly. The result, said Prevx, is a black screen , sometimes dubbed “black screen of death” in a sop to the “blue screen of death” that Windows puts up after a major system crash.

Prevx added that security software seemed to be especially affected.

Although the Microsoft spokesman said the company would provide additional information once its support and security teams complete their investigations, it was unclear Monday exactly how extensive the problem was, or how many users were affected.

Searches of Microsoft’s support forums today, for example, turned up only one “black screen” thread with posts after the Nov. 10 security updates had been released. Four different users on that Windows 7-specific thread said that they faced a blank screen.

On Nov. 19, a moderator of the support forum suggested a workaround that involved starting another Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) process. Prevx essentially gave the same advice a week later when it told users with blank screens how to download a free tool it said would fix the problem.

Microsoft’s November collection of patches addressed 15 vulnerabilities in six security updates.

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