The large number of Office updates caught Storms' eye: Three of the pending bulletins are Office-only, while one is shared with Windows and Silverlight. The trio of Office-only updates will patch flaws in Word, Excel and Visio. The latter is a little-used commercial diagramming program that's considered part of the Office family.

"There's a heavy lean toward Office here," Storms noted.

Storms pointed his finger at what Microsoft labeled Bulletin 2 as the most likely to rise to the top of the to-do list next week. His reasons: It was pegged critical, impacts virtually every edition of Windows, applies to all currently-supported versions of Office on Windows and also patches one or more bugs in Silverlight.

Although today's for next week's Patch Tuesday was the usual bare-bones outline, Storms suspected that Bulletin 2 would fix bugs in the .Net development framework, which is included by default with Windows, and is also used by Office programmers.

".Net could be the common ground," Storms speculated.