Last month's Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild.

This month's Patch Tuesday looks like it's going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it's aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won't fix Windows XP. Promise.

Of course, last month's end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn't. Microsoft cited the "proximity" of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month's bugs seem barely less proximal.

The extra patch earlier this month led plenty of executives to believe that Microsoft would blink and that the urgency to replace Windows XP had evaporated. Redmond may have some work to do to convince them that this time, it's serious.