Microsoft completed its investigation into the so-called Black Screen of Death (BSOD) that was widely reported Monday and Tuesday and has found that it's completely bogus. According to the software giant, reports of a BSOD related to the security updates it issued in November are inaccurate.
"The company has found [the BSOD] reports to be inaccurate, and our comprehensive investigation has shown that none of the recently released [security] updates are related to the behavior described in the reports," a Microsoft representative told me late Tuesday. "While we were not contacted by the organization [that] originally made these reports, we have proactively contacted them with our findings. Our support organization is also not seeing this as an issue. The claims do not match any known issues that have been documented in the security bulletins or KB articles."
The BSOD reports were first reported by Prevx, a British security firm. Prevx originally said it identified "at least 10 different scenarios" that could trigger the BSOD conditions. But after being consulted by Microsoft about the problem, the company issued a second statement in which it agreed that Microsoft's November security patches weren't to blame, as it had originally claimed.
"We apologize to Microsoft for any inconvenience [we] may have caused," a statement from Prevx reads. "This has been a challenging issue to identify. Users who have the black screen issue referred to can still safely use our free fix tool to restore their desktop icons and task bar."