Roses. Chocolate. Fine wine. These are the typical Valentine's Day gifts that most of us have come to expect. But Microsoft isn't just any suitor--no, they know you far better than that. To set themselves apart from the rest of the pack, Microsoft will be making a special delivery this Valentine's Day: a dozen red, long-stemmed, fragrant patches. On February 13th (technically the day before Valentine's Day but come on, work with me here), Microsoft will release the patches via Automatic Update. Although the company never releases the full skinny on patches until they're released, we can fairly easily speculate, based on the number of unpatched Office [1], Windows [2] and IE zero-day attacks [3] in the wild. The patches to be released are as follows:

- Five Windows patches, some of which are critical
- Two Office patches, at least one of which is critical
- One Windows/Visual Studio patch
- One Windows/Office patch
- One Microsoft Step-by-Step Interactive Training patch
- One critical patch for Microsoft Data Access Components
- One critical Windows Live OneCare/Microsoft Antigen/Microsoft Windows Defender/Microsoft Forefront patch

For more on the patches:
- see this post [4] at the Microsoft Security Response Center Blog