Microsoft's Patch Tuesday fixes came for Windows Server 2008 and, even though Randall Kennedy had previously disabled Automatic Updates, the patches went ahead and installed themselves.

Then the nagging messages about having to reboot started showing up, which Kennedy elected to postpone, until Windows decided that enough was enough and engaged in the practice of reboot without consent.

"This despite the fact that I was still actively typing at the keyboard! I was left to watch helplessly as my unfinished Web posting disappeared in a blur of closing windows and fading UI effects," Kennedy explains in Burned by Acrobat and Windows update -- on the same day.

And that's not all.

"Shortly after my system was forcibly rebooted, it hung solid. The culprit: Adobe Acrobat Reader."

Kennedy, in fact, had to revert to what he calls the infamous "ACPI override" technique.

"I'd like to assign sole blame to Adobe for the bug," Kennedy writes, "but the fact is that no application should be able to lock-up the Windows desktop in this fashion ... After all, nobody should be able to take-down a multi-million dollar server farm simply by loading a PDF document at the system console."

Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 9, 2008 11:53 AM