Users of Hewlett-Packard printers, scanners and cameras may be experiencing some problems after installing Microsoft's latest round of security patches, released late last week. The problems, which concern a Windows operating system patch numbered MS06-015, can cause some applications to crash, Microsoft warned Saturday.

The scope is limited at the moment but the impact might be that an application could hang when conducting certain operations, like opening a file from the "File-open" dialog in an application. While we're working on determining all the affected possibilities, you can do the following if you've been affected:

- (If you have multiple user accounts set up) Log onto the computer using an account with Administrator privileges
- Click the Start button, then click Run and type "regedit" at the prompt, without the quotes; this will start Registry Editor
- Locate the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Shell Extensions\Cached key in Registry Editor
- Right click on the key and select New / DWORD Value
- Rename the resulting value "{A4DF5659-0801-4A60-9607-1C48695EFDA9}{000214E6-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} 0x401", without the quotes
- Right click the value, select Modify, and type "1" into the Value Data field
- Close Registry Editor