Microsoft plans to release five patches on Tuesday as part of its regular Patch Tuesday update cycle. Redmond is also to release a fix to address application conflict problems with last week's "emergency" cursor security update.

Four of the new patches, at least one of which is critical, affect Microsoft Windows. Users will be obliged to restart their computers after applying these updates. The other patch covers a critical flaw in Microsoft Content Management Server.

Redmond last week broke its normal schedule and released a patch to defend against an animated cursor (.ANI) flaw in Windows. The update is classified as critical, and with good reason, since the flaw it addresses has become the subject of widespread hacking attacks over the last two weeks. Unfortunately the fix trips up a number of applications including ElsterFormular, TUGZip, CD-Tag, and Realtek HD Audio Control Panel, preventing these programs from loading normally after users apply Microsoft's latest security patch.

In response, Microsoft has developed a hotfix to smooth over these conflicts, which it plans to push out as a "high priority" non-security update on Tuesday, as explained on a post to Microsoft's Security Response blog here. ®

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