Mar 4, 2011 11:51 GMT  ·  By

In less than a month after the general availability deadline of Windows 7 Service Pack 1, Microsoft is preparing to release the first update designed to resolve a Critical security vulnerability in the upgraded copies of Windows Vista’s successor. As part of the company’s normal patch cycle, this month’s security bulletins will be released on March 8th at 10:00 a.m. PST.

Only customers running Windows and Office will need to apply the patches, with those leveraging the operating system having to treat one of the security bulletins as a priority when it comes down to deployment.

“This month we'll release three bulletins, one of them rated Critical and two rated Important, addressing issues in Microsoft Windows and Office. We'll close four vulnerabilities with those bulletins,” revealed Angela Gunn, security response communications manager, Microsoft.

The security bulletin that is rated Critical impacts all supported versions of the Windows client, including the recently released Windows 7 SP1 RTM.

Customers around the world can get the first upgrade for Windows 7 through either the Microsoft Download Center or Windows Update as of February 22nd.

Although SP1 is designed, among other things, to bring to the table a collection of patches, it appears that the Redmond company has come across a new vulnerability affecting Windows 7 sometime after the upgrade was completed.

Additional details about the security flaw patched in Windows 7 SP1 will only be provided on March 8th, with the release of the security bulletins.

The remaining Windows patch package does not impact Windows 7 SP1 RTM, but only the RTM version of the platform.

Office 2010 users will also have an easy month, patch-wise, since the one security bulletin delivered for the productivity suite will fix an issue in Groove 2007 SP2 and nothing more.

Windows 7 SP1 RTM and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RTM are available for download here.