Microsoft on Tuesday is set to release six security updates, three of which it has deemed critical and apply only to versions of Windows other than Windows 7. Microsoft released advance notice of its Security Bulletin for November, on Nov. 5. The bulletin itself will be released on Tuesday along with remedies, as per its normal patch cycle. Other alerts are labeled "important," one of which involves a denial of service vulnerability for Windows; the other two affect Excel. Redmond will reportedly release updates for Windows XP, 2003 and 2007 and Office 2004 and 2008 for Mac OS X.

Save the one warning of DoS attacks, all the vulnerabilities involve remote code execution, as did the 13 patches released by Microsoft on October 13, fixing nearly three dozen flaws, all of them critical. A critical warning is one "whose exploitation could allow the propagation of an Internet worm without user action," according to the company, while one that is one step down at important, is said to be one that "could result in compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of users data, or of the integrity or availability of processing resources."

Microsoft on Monday also released an update to MS09-054, the part of its October patch-fest that applied to Internet Explorer. This one, which went somewhat under the radar, as explained on the company's technet Website, addresses the way pages are rendered.