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#11
*facepalm*
Windows version numbers are in 4 parts: 6.1.build.QFE.
Whenever a hotfix updates a file, it updates the "QFE" portion of the version number (the "QFE" number for W7RTM is 0x4001 (16385)) for that file ("QFE" is the name that Microosft internally calls that last number, according to some MSFT employees). It has been like this since... forever. You install a Windows 2000 hotfix, and it's going to update the QFE portion of the version of the file that is updated. If you install a Windows XP hotfix, the file's QFE number is going to be changed. If you install a Vista hotfix... you get the picture.
The version number reported in the registry and in the about dialogs (for XP, at least) are taken from the version number of the main kernel EXE file.
Which means that any hotfix that happens to update the main kernel EXE file will also update the QFE portion of the version number that "represents" the whole system.
This is nothing new or exceptional. It has always been like this. XP and Vista version numbers have been updated in a similar fashion countless times (each time there was a kernel hotfix, and there's been a lot of them!).
To reiterate: all that is going on is that there's a hotfix that updates a small handful of files, but it just so happens that one of these files is the kernel, so Windows "reports" a different version number. Anyone who pays attention to the behavior of XP and Vista hotfixes knows that this is not news, not anything special, and not anything to get excited over (though I've lost count of the number of times I've had to correct people about this even on places like Wikipedia).
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