I’ll be honest—patch weeks are always a mix of anticipation and dread. You know the drill: security fixes roll in, you schedule downtime, apply updates, and hope nothing explodes. Well, this December update (KB5071546) decided to test our patience by messing with Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ).
Why I’m Talking About This
MSMQ isn’t flashy, but it’s the glue in a lot of enterprise setups. I’ve seen it quietly ferry messages between apps in retail POS systems, building automation, even custom finance workflows. So when Microsoft warns that MSMQ may fail after a patch, I pay attention.
My Setup & First Encounter
Running Hyper-V on a ThinkPad with 32GB RAM, I spun up a test VM with Windows Server 2019. Not gonna lie, I was winging it at first—just wanted to see if the patch would trip MSMQ under load. Sure enough, queues started throwing errors like:
- “Insufficient resources to perform operation”
- “The message file C:\Windows\System32\msmq\storage.mq cannot be created”*
The log entries were almost mocking me: “There is insufficient disk space or memory”—even though Task Manager showed plenty of both.
The Gotcha Moment
Most guides will tell you MSMQ permissions are locked down for good reason. But after this patch, MSMQ suddenly needed write access to its storage folder (C:\Windows\System32\msmq). That’s normally admin-only territory. So apps trying to push messages just… failed.
Back in 2019, I bricked a VM by tinkering with NTFS permissions on system folders. That memory came rushing back when I realized the “fix” here was to loosen permissions temporarily. Déjà vu, but with higher stakes.
Workarounds & Lessons Learned
Here’s what worked for me in the lab:
- Grant write access to the MSMQ directory for the MSMQ service account.
- Roll back the patch if you’re in production and can’t afford downtime.
- Document everything—because reverting permissions later is easy to forget.
Microsoft’s official stance? “Contact Support for Business.” Which, let’s be real, is the last thing you want to hear when your POS machines are down in December.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t the first MSMQ scare. Last year we had a critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2024-30008). Now it’s a patch-induced meltdown. The bigger lesson for me: always test patches in a sandbox before rolling them out to production. I used to skip that step when pressed for time, but this incident reminded me why it matters.
