Microsoft's new-found and recently publicized interest in security has yielded fruit in the form of a security rollup patch for Win2K which clears up a number of niggling hassles with the usual slew of unchecked buffers and some authentication issues and transfer protocols.

The 17MB whopper is the first comprehensive offering since SP2 back in May, and addresses most of the bugs and glitches the company has been warned of since that time.

We have to wonder if MS itself discovered any of the issues the mega-patch addresses. They rarely do, but this is one of the innovations Chairman Gates has implicitly called for. We've heard the rhetoric , so we know MS has just become a security-conscious software maker.

It's just that they've never been quite that kind of security-conscious software maker, and it should be most interesting to watch that change, if it can.