I did a bunch of updates on an outdated Windows 7 machine that was running as an apache server in my home. It was commonly used for this. However, after the slew up of updates I found Apache wouldn't start, and eventually found the reason for this is one of the updates had decided to activate Microsoft's WWW Publisher service, blocking the port that Apache wanted to use.
Now, I checked the WWWPS info online, and "supposably" it's never supposed to be on by default, but requires user activation to turn on. Although I know from experience this is not the case (but as that night had over 70 win7 updates, I can't pinpoint the one that did it). I experimented and found that this service was displaying a blank page (so localhost showed a blank page... not an error page... just a blank white page whose source was simply
<html>
. I had also recently virus scanned, so moderately confident it wasn't a virus). Also, subpages weren't erroring out, but also showing these odd blank pages.
For the next Win 7 Apache server I decide to update, does anyone know which update does this... and ....why? Is there some subpage that actually shows something? Is something being revealed that shouldn't? This is not standard behavior and doesn't seem to me to be secure, just randomly deciding to open up web publishing services without my permission. Anybody know anything?
