Nov 18, 2010 12:36 GMT  ·  By

Dave Forstrom, director, response communications, Microsoft confirmed that version 2.0 of the company’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) had some problems with some update mechanisms associated with third-party applications.

On November 17th, Forstrom told me that an update would be provided to EMET customers addressing any issues they might face with apps that would no longer update after security mitigations were added with the free security tool from the Redmond company.

Subsequently, Microsoft made available for download Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) version 2.0.0.3 which resolves glitches related to the update functionality of software from Adobe and Google.

“Adobe Reader / Acrobat - Due to this issue, the updater may require Reader and Acrobat users to reboot in order to complete an upgrade when they otherwise would only have been required to close and restart the application,” revealed Andrew Roths and Fermin J. Serna from MSRC Engineering.

“Google Chrome - This issue may affect machines with multiple users running Chrome at the same time with each instance configured for use with EMET. If one of those instances is running as an admin, it will block the other running instances from self-updating.

“Please note that on Vista, Server 2008, Windows 7, and Server 2008 R2, users must explicitly right click on Chrome and select “run as administrator” to be affected.”

There are no new features or capabilities introduced with EMET 2.0.0.3. The purpose of this update is solely to resolve the problems reported for the updaters to Chrome, Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat.

Still, the fact of the matter is that some customers might have experienced no issues at all.

The software giant explained that only some customers have reported problems, and those that did not also don’t actually need to update EMET.

“If you do decide to update your deployment and have the previous MSI installed on your machines, you can roll out the new MSI as an upgrade,” Serna said.

“Alternately, if you configured the machines with EMET_Conf running from a central share, you can simply replace the binaries on that share and run “EMET_Conf --list" on each of the machines. EMET_Conf will update the necessary files.”