dutara said:
Well, I can't say for sure how this happened, but...
I run Win7 with Comodo Firewall, Avast Antivirus, and Windows Defender.
Left my system on overnight running torrents. This morning just happened to notice Comodo Firewall was not running. WTF? I am certain I did not turn it off. All the same, went about looking through the morning messages.
Then my system locks up. It happens sometimes. Cold reboot. Windows comes up, I enter pw, all appears normal until that very last part when Windows loads gadgets (heed a warning? me?), then the system freezes, screen goes pale like someone draped a thin tissue over the screen. I do another cold reboot. Same. It works like it always does, until the last few seconds when the gadgets should load. Freeze happens again. I notice the hard disk activity light is not flashing, as it usually does while the gadgets load.
I wasn't in the mood for forensic research, so restored a backup from 10 days before. This bu was before MS put out that load of recent updates (I think it was Aug 14).
After restore the first thing I did was shut off Gadget's sidebar.

Even though these holes have been there for years the recent publicity could very well attract people with nothing better to do.
Perhaps the updates affected your system but they didn't with mine and I use several gadgets including system control (shutdown, restart and cmd buttons), applauncher, network meter and cpu/memory meter all working perfectly.

:)