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The dirty dozen heralds a bumper month of patches and is likely to clock up the overtime for IT support staff next week.

Microsoft Office is the culprit for four of the seven critical bugs, according to the company's security bulletin. All seven relate to remote code execution.

There are a further five patches described as "important" - Microsoft's second most serious state of alert. The important patches address remote code execution, denial of service and elevation of privileges across a variety of Microsoft's products, including - unusually - the home productivity suite, Microsoft Works.

The patches arrive just a month ahead of the release of Vista Service Pack 1 , which will solely address bugs and security flaws in Microsoft's latest operating system. However, even the Service Pack has been hit with driver issues, which will mean that certain PC configurations are not automatically updated with the Pack.