I guess the reason is that by studying the patch, even a short term workaround such as this, you can deduce what the vulnerability is and quickly knock out a wo

I guess the reason is that by studying the patch, even a short term workaround such as this, you can deduce what the vulnerability is and quickly knock out a working exploit. I'm not suggesting that security-through-obscurity was the correct choice by MS, or the time taken to build a comprehensive fix was acceptable, but from the article it seems that this has been a bit of a gnarly issue to solve properly and even a cursory fix might reveal deeper seated issues. I'm not defending MS here, but I imagine that Word's codebase is a helluva pile of cards to work on. Especially given that it can still open document formats such as WordPerfect 5 which date back to 1988. Add in all the legacy OLE automation stuff, a VBA environment and all those shims and backwards compatibility things that MS are known for (see Old New Thing blog) that translates as "One Does Not Simply Patch Word".