Microsoft today announced plans to patch 22 serious security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and Office productivity suite.

As part of the July Patch Tuesday releases, Microsoft will ship four bulletins. One of the bulletins will carry a "critical" rating because of a high risk of remote code execution attacks.

Three of the four bulletins will address security holes in Windows, the company's flagship operating system. Affected Windows versions include Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

The Microsoft Office update will ship patches for security problems in Microsoft Visio 2003 Service Pack 3.

The bulletins are slated for release on July 12th at 10:00 a.m. PDT.