Microsoft plans two security bulletins; one critical impacting Vista

Microsoft plans a relatively light haul of two security bulletins on Patch Tuesday, but one of them is rated critical and dings Vista.

Thursday's preview, which is an advance notice for folks that need to prepare for Microsoft's patches on Jan. 8, highlight two issues.

The first bulletin is rated critical and covers a remote code execution. Things get interesting when Microsoft talks about the affected versions of Windows.

For Vista the bulletin covering the remote code execution is rated "critical." The bulletin is also critical for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and its Service Pack 2. For Server 2003, however, the bulletin is merely "important."

As for the second bulletin, Microsoft says a "local elevation of privilege" vulnerability is "important." This problem affects Windows 2000 Server Pack 4, XP and Windows Server 2003 but doesn't apply to Vista.