Today one of our customers contacted us with the following note regarding Windows update.

“Beware Windows update KB981793 concerning daylight saving times.  This is called an “important” update and is installed automatically on to XP is auto-update is on.
It was installed on my computer last Tuesday and all seemed OK for a few days, but then I noticed both Firefox and IE8 getting very slow and hesitant.  On Saturday the whole computer began to get slow and by Sunday a every program took at least 2 minutes to open and all mouse and keyboard functions were delayed for nearly a minute.  An Avast scan that normally takes 30 minutes took 1½ hours and an SD scan that normally takes 50 minutes took nearly three hours.  They were both clean as this was not the problem.

I looked to see what had been installed and found this KB update from last Tuesday, so I managed to do a System Restore to last Monday (it took three hours with my fingers crossed) and when it had eventually restored I found that everything had returned to normal – thank goodness.”

Please note it effects XP, Vista and Windows 7. So if you have problems check to see whether you have the update and if so perform a system restore to a date earlier than when you installed the update. If the problem is not solved by this then you can always undo the restore.