2 essential pre-SP1 Vista rollup patches released - KB 938194 and KB 938979

I highly recommend installing these patches and rolling them into your BDD / WIM / 3rd party images for Vista. Unfortunately some early versions leaked to various websites a week ago or so.

For maximum benefit, install KB 938194 and 938979. Those links to the KB articles may not work yet because the files were just posted today.

KB 938194 - x86 - download here
KB 938979 - x86 - download here

The x64 patches don't seem to be live yet and I suspect it might be due to a driver signing issue that people had reported. I don't know for sure, but I am guessing they will be online shortly as well.

Details of the patches:

KB 938194 - Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

1. Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
2. Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
3. Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
4. Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
5. Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
6. Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
7. Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
8. Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
9. Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
10. Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
11. Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

KB 938979 - Vista Performance and Reliability Pack

This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios.

Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

1. Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
2. Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
3. Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
4. Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
5. Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
6. Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
7. Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
8. Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
9. Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
10. Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
11. Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.