A security update may switch the home page of users to MSN. That's a dirty trick the giant should be ashamed of

Q: Last night I came home to find that my kitchen PC suddenly was using MSN, not Google, for its Internet Explorer home page. I was just changing it back, thinking the nanny had changed it, when my wife commented that all the PCs at her office had done the same thing. Then I found all my children's computers had done the same thing. As a point of principle, I'm deleting MSN Messenger from all my PCs since it appears that big brother Microsoft (MSFT ) has lost control of itself. A: It looks like Microsoft tried to get a little benefit for itself when it repaired a serious security flaw. Here's what seems to have happened to your computers. On Feb. 8, as part of a huge batch of Windows security updates, Microsoft released a patch for a "critical" vulnerability in MSN Messenger that could allow hostile code to be hidden in an image. Within a couple of days, information on how to exploit the vulnerability was circulating on the Internet, and Microsoft decided it needed to take further, more drastic action to protect Messenger users. So it made installation of the patch mandatory.