Anyone running Microsoft Office will want to make sure they get the slew of bulletins pushed out today as part of Patch Tuesday, with numerous bugs in the suite being fixed. Microsoft issued updates for known flaws in Excel and Word, affecting versions of Office ranging from Office 2002 all the way up to Office 2007 on the PC, as well as Office 2004 and 2008 on the Mac. The less used WordPad also received an update, due to it sharing a flaw with Office that could result in system compromise.

Today's patches also included fixes for DirectX and local security flaws that could lead to system compromise on machines where someone has local access. Other fixes included numerous patches for Internet Explorer 5, 6 and 7, though no fixes were posted for Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft has been looking to curb the need for updates on older versions anyway, with the announcement that the browser will soon become a high priority update, in an attempt to convince people to install it. All in all, it was a pretty decent patch cycle this month, with Microsoft knocking out well over twenty security flaws across numerous platforms.