"It looks like an Office month," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. "Look at the 'Affected Software' column on the . Office, Office, Office."

The one update pegged critical, Microsoft's highest threat ranking, will tackle bugs in all supported versions of Office on Windows. The remaining six updates were labeled "important," the next-most-serious rating in the company's four-step scoring system.

There was no update scheduled for Internet Explorer (IE), as Microsoft took care of that last month when it rushed out an exploiting a bug in the browser. The Sept. 21 "out-of-band" update also included patches for several additional vulnerabilities, which were originally slated to ship next week.

Security experts, not surprisingly, all tapped the critical Office update as the one to plan to deploy as soon as possible.

"It's not only the one critical [update]. It's also critical in Word 2007 and Word 2010, but only important in Office 2003," said Storms in an interview Thursday. "We haven't seen a good critical Word bug in a while, and as I've said before, the newer [versions] should be more secure. That's not the case here."