One security bulletin, rated as Important, affects Microsoft Office, including older versions such as Office XP and Office 2003. This security bulletin also impacts Microsoft Works 8.5 and the Office Converter Pack, which provides some backward file-viewing compatibility with the older Office 97 suite.

It is worth noting that Windows 7 is not affected by any of the six security bulletins. The security bulletin that addresses the Internet Explorer 8 zero-day flaw discovered after last month's Patch Tuesday has a peripheral impact on Windows 7, but the operating system itself is not targeted by any of the upcoming patches.

The recent KSOD (this is the acronym adopted for the "black screen of death" issue because BSOD is already part of the technology lexicon as "blue screen of death") issue is not addressed by any of the security bulletins. Microsoft is still investigating the root cause of the issue and may release a patch at a later date if it determines that the problem is a flaw in the operating system.

Next week will wrap up 2009 for the Microsoft security bulletins--barring any out-of-band updates that are sometime released on an emergency basis when a vulnerability is having a pervasive and immediate impact. It will be interesting to see what 2010 has in store.