"There have been more than 50,000 downloads of the free fix tool since we made it available 5 days ago," said Morris. The black screen of death, or BSOD, occurs when users attempt to boot their PCs. In cases where the bug occurs, the user is faced with a black or blank screen and is forced to reboot. It has reportedly hit PCs running Windows 7, Vista, and Windows XP. Prevx caused a hubbub earlier this week when it posted a blog indicating that the problem was caused by a recently issued Microsoft security patch. But the company later backtracked, stating the cause is still unknown and may be the result of malware or some other security breach. "The emergence of this issue coincided with the recent set of Windows updates, therefore our investigations were focused on identifying if any of these could have been the cause of the problem," said Morris, in Wednesday's post. "Regrettably, it is clear that our original blog post has been taken out of context and may have caused inconvenience for Microsoft. This was never our intention and we have already apologized to Microsoft," Morris wrote. For its part, Microsoft insists it's not behind the BSOD glitch, but to date has not offered an explanation or a fix of its own. "Microsoft has investigated reports that its November security updates made changes to permissions in the registry that are resulting in system issues for some customers," said a Microsoft spokesman. Microsoft's Customer Service and Support organization is "not seeing 'black screen' behavior as a broad customer issue," the spokesman said.
Complete B.S.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/183529/black_screen_of_death_a_lesson_in_fud.html