The snafu involving one of Microsoft's recent security patches continued to grow as the developer acknowledged new incompatibility problems with some video drivers and users on the company's forums complained about having to uninstall the fix or resort to unsanctioned repairs.

Reports first surfaced Friday of problems caused by the MS06-015 security bulletin, which was rolled out to fix a critical flaw in Windows Explorer, the operating system's core file navigator. Troubles ranged from lockups of third-party software to Internet Explorer going dead.

Saturday, Microsoft posted a document that outlined the patch's problems and offered a temporary workaround that requires users to edit the Windows registry, a potentially dangerous chore, since a single error in the registry can cause the PC to refuse to boot into the OS.

Tuesday, Mike Reavey, operations manager of the Microsoft Security Response Center, said that the patch not only conflicts with older versions of Hewlett-Packard "Share-to-Web" software, but added that it also is incompatible with older editions of NVIDIA graphics card drivers.

He recommended that users upgrade to the most current versions of HP's Share-to-Web and NVIDIA drivers, as those seem to not impact the patch.

Overall, however, Reavey downplayed the extent of the MS06-015 patch problem. "To give you some idea of the scope of the problem, so far out of over 120 million successful installations of the MS06-015 update, the number of calls related to this issue is currently well under a thousand."

That's no comfort to the scores of angry users on Microsoft's official newsgroups, including the Windows Update group, who continued Tuesday to tick off new troubles, including problems with the Windows version of iTunes, and symptoms such as system hangs whenever a file is saved.

Some are simply fed up with the run-around.

"I think the focus on HP is wrong as there are other programs out there also caused the problem. MS has to fix KB908531 otherwise we will have to tweak all other applications which is wrong !!!!" wrote a user identified as "Allen."