Vista fixes to come down the tubes - Out in time for Leopard

Come August 14th Microsoft should have a surprise for all Vista users  - two batches of fixes which improve reliability, compatibility and performance.

Here's the scoop on the two bundles that we can expect next Patch Tuesday:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the 'estimated time remaining' when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista's Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

While there's no doubt that I'm looking forward to these updates because I've been personally bitten by a good chunk of these issues in my time with Vista, I'm also going to be careful rolling out these patches.  With this kind of volume of changes happening all at once, my Spider senses are tingling a bit and I'm not doing anything rash like rolling out this patch without having backups and trying it out on a few test machines first.  More haste, less speed ...

I'd recommend that everyone else do the same - definitely wait and see what the feedback is like on these before rolling out the patches on mission-critical systems.  At least make sure that you have a backup handy.

On a more cynical note, anyone else thing that it's suspicious that Microsoft has been tight-lipped about patches and bug fixes for Vista and yet we see a pretty major patch roll-out within a few weeks of Apple releasing Leopard?  Hmmm ...

Thoughts?