Last week, Microsoft got yet another security black eye when a new, ready-to-be exploited IE security hole was revealed. This week, Microsoft is trying to redeem itself with a pair of quick fixes for the problem.
The IE 6 and 7 security hole is a serious one and it’s already being exploited so you should head over to Microsoft support for one of the two fixes for this IE problem. No, you read that right. There are two separate fixes. Unfortunately, no matter which one you pick, they come with potential problems.
The first one disables the peer factory class in the Windows registry. ‘Peer factory’ is used by the iepeers.dll binary program in IE 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 to call some kinds of Windows functionality from within IE. The most common way it’s used is to print from IE. The downside of this fix, as you might guess, is that it will stop IE’s print functionality from working.