As in every second Tuesday of each moth, day which is also called Patch Tuesday, Microsoft issued its regular security patches for some of its software products.

As usual, the patches contain fixes for all known vulnerabilities of Microsoft’s products, only this time, Microsoft broke the record and fixed a total of 26 flaws with no less than 10 patches.

The patches include critical fixes for both Office and Windows and some also apply to Windows Vista and to Office on the Apple Mac. Microsoft said last week to expect 11 patches, however, a company’s representative said on Tuesday that a planned critical Windows patch “did not meet the quality bar” and so was not issued.

The number of fixed flaws would have been even larger yesterday if Microsoft wouldn’t have broken its regular patch release cycle two weeks ago by issuing a patch for a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting Internet Explorer. Microsoft decided to release this patch due to the fact that the vulnerability was widely exploited by malicious persons and that lead to several security experts criticizing the software giant for not caring about its customers.

The yesterday patch release was not without problems as fixes were still unavailable 4 hours after the planned release. According to Microsoft’s Craig Gehere, who wrote about the issue in a blog posting, the trouble arose because of “some network issues on the Microsoft Update platform”. Later in the day, Gehere updated his blog to say that the problem has been fixed.

Even so, as of this time, some user are still haven’t received the updates via the Automatic Update System embedded in Windows. However, all the patches are available for download at Microsoft’s Web site.