Windows Patches Kill Operations Console on V5R3 and V5R4

A warning from the OS/400 community: According to a number of people who applied patches to their Windows machines last week, as Microsoft instructed them to patch on Tuesday, as soon as their patches were applied, the operations console links into their OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 systems stopped working.

Jeff Crosby reported his troubled with “Mikeysoft” patches and operations console relating to i5/OS V5R4 on the Midrange-L user group, while Thomas Hauber reported problems with the Windows Update and the operations console linking into OS/400 V5R3 over at the comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc newsgroup.

As IBM’s iSeries Operation Console site explains, this is not the first time Microsoft has stepped on this software. Security patches to Windows NT killed links to the iSeries and AS/400, and patches to Windows 2000 that came in Service Pack 4 also caused problems. Microsoft issued a hotfix patch that resolved both issues in these cases. I searched the Microsoft KnowledgeBase just before we went to press and did not find any fixes yet.