I check my installed update history and it had automatically installed.
All software has bugs, and beta testing is designed to find them, so it's not exactly a shock to find a bug in Windows 7 RC … but this one looks bigger than you might hope for at this stage of the game
Windows 7 has so far led something of a charmed life, and been widely showered with praise, but with software, you never know what sort of bear pits are hidden in the undergrowth. Now, according to Windows expert Ed Bott, Windows 7 RC gets its first bug, and it's a doozy.
He writes:
Yesterday, Microsoft published Knowledge Base article 970789, which provides details of a problem that affects the 32-bit (x86) English-language version of Windows 7 build 7100. The problem, in short, is that the installer incorrectly sets access control lists (ACLs) on the root of the system drive.
It's a pretty serious bug, says Bott, who is "surprised that it slipped through into the release candidate."
Well, this is why software companies have beta tests, and "Release Candidate" isn't the same as "Release To Manufacturing". It's certainly better than finding bugs in the shipping code.
If you are running 32-bit Windows 7 with Automatic Updates turned on, the code may have been downloaded or patched overnight. One of Bott's systems was, but he points out that "it does not repair applications that are already installed". If you're running the 64-bit version, that seems not to be affected.
