December 02, 2009, 3:06 PM — Windows does get black screens of death, but it doesn't get them from the November Windows and Office updates that UK security company Prevx blamed recently.
Prevx claimed that the security patches caused a new rash of black screens of death. Microsoft denied that these updates had caused this problem. And, indeed, Microsoft said that, as far as they could tell, there were no new flood of black screen of death problems period.
Guess what? It turns out Microsoft was right. Prevx has publicly apologized to Microsoft and put the blame for the problem on malware. The company also claims that their free repair program will still fix some malware-created black screen of death problems.
When this first showed up, I said that if you were being plagued by black death screens you might give their fix a try. After this, I wouldn't bother.
I'm sure there is a new black screen problem on a few computers, but after getting the cause wrong, I don't trust that Prevx's solution is really getting at the root of the problem. Indeed, for my future Windows security needs I'll be going to the usual suspects--such as Kaspersky, McAfee, and Symantec--and avoiding Prevx.
