March may not be T.S. Eliot’s cruelest month, but for Windows and Office customers, it was a doozy.

While the February patches went in with little angst, you should be very cautious about how you patch this time around. And with the Creators Update poised to strike in less than two weeks, now’s a very good time to make sure your Win10 Automatic Updates are defanged.

Here’s a recap of the big bugs in the March 14 Patch Tuesday emissions and the state of their fixes:

• Microsoft’s Win10 cumulative updates, Win7 and 8.1 Monthly Rollups, and the cumulative Internet Explorer patch — six patches or more, depending on how you count — all broke Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM 2011 and CRM 2013 OnPremises, as well as various Telerik controls. Microsoft fixed the bugs with a slew of revised patches released nine days later. In the interim, those of you with Dynamics CRM 2011 had to deal with bad reports or a byzantine series of patching instructions.
• The Excel 2010 security patch KB 3178690 froze and crashed Excel 2010. Two weeks later, Microsoft fixed the botched patch with KB 3191855. Those caught by the first patch had no choice but to manually uninstall it, assuming they could figure out why Excel didn’t work.
• Word 2016’s Security Update KB 3178674 makes certain kinds of characters illegible. Microsoft hasn’t fixed the problem.
• The Office Click-to-Run update 7870.2024, released to the Current Channel on March 14, broke searching in Outlook, making it impossible to search for certain kinds of emails. Microsoft’s manual solution involved another byzantine series of steps. As best I can tell — the jury’s still out — the new Office C-t-R version 7870.2013, released on March 27, solves the problem, although it doesn’t undo the changes many people had to make to get search working again.

If you thought Microsoft’s worked out the problems with automatic updating, think again. Very nearly all versions of Windows and Office were hit with bad patches this month, and it took more than a week to solve most of the problems. Those stuck with automatic updating, or Win10’s proclivity to re-install everything in sight even after it’s uninstalled, was hit repeatedly.