With Patch Tuesday coming tomorrow, now’s a good time to make sure you have Windows Automatic Update throttled. Yes, you need to patch sooner or later. No, you don’t need to do it in lockstep with Microsoft’s, uh, exuberant pace.

Case in point: On Jan. 3, Microsoft released 14 non-security Office patches. (Those are patches for the “perpetual” installed “MSI” versions of Office, not the Office 365 Click-to-Run versions. You gotta love the terminology.) The bug fixes covered a range of bugs, most notably including errors in the way Japanese dates are displayed.

A few hours later, the Japanese-language blogs erupted with reports that four of the new patches — the ones for Office 2010 — caused Excel to throw a Stop error when it was opened. The bad patches:

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