Microsoft Fixes Flawed Excel Patches

Microsoft on Thursday issued a revised set of patches for multiple flaws in its popular Excel spreadsheet program that were first fixed more than a week ago.

The re-release was necessary, said Microsoft, to quash a problem that cropped up in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean editions.

Version 2.0 of MS07-002, the security bulletin released Jan. 9 that patched five Excel bugs, all of them pegged as "critical" for Excel 2000 and "important" for later editions, has been posted to the Microsoft support site.

"While the original version of this security update for Excel 2000 does protect against all vulnerabilities discussed in the bulletin, it does not correctly process the phonetic information that is embedded in files that are created by using Excel in the Korean, Chinese, or Japanese executable mode," said a Microsoft spokesperson Wednesday.

According to an associated document in Microsoft's support database, only users of Excel 2000 need apply the revamped patches. Not doing so will make it impossible to open Excel files created with any Chinese, Japanese, or Korean version of the spreadsheet.

The January slate of four Microsoft security updates included fixes for 10 flaws, seven of them labeled as critical.

Microsoft has had patch quality control problems for months. In October 2006, it had to reissue a Windows 2000 update, while out of the 12 updates released in August, the company subsequently re-released three, one of them a record three times.