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Windows will receive the lion's share of these, with five destined for the flagship operating system. Microsoft says that these will tackle issues, some of which it ranks as Critical - its most severe rating - and may require systems to be rebooted.

The sixth update affects Visual Studio. This too is rated as Critical.

No updates are available for Office, indicating

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that the recently discovered problem in Word, which Microsoft says is already subject to exploit code it has seen, will not be fixed in this month's bulletin.

Yesterday it notified customers of yet more exploit code it was aware of, targetting a flaw in a Windows Media format. It says a modified version of the XML-based media file format Windows Media ASX could be used to cause a buffer overflow in Windows Media Player, allowing code to be run on the target machine remotely.

The company said that although it had seen exploit code in the public domain, it wasn't aware of any attacks using the code. It also said that it was investigating other methods of causing the buffer overflow in Media Player.

Microsoft will also release an updated version of the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool next Tuesday on Windows Update, Microsoft Update, Windows Server Update Services and the Download Center.