Patching computers increases vulnerability?

[pne]

Someone pointed out this quote to me from [1]:

In einem internen Testlauf stellten wir fest, dass das Exploit auf einem Windows XP mit IE 6.0 erst lauffähig war, nachdem wir alle aktuellen Sicherheitspatches von windowsupdate.com eingespielt hatten

or in English:

In an internal test we found that the exploit would only run on a Windows XP system with IE 6.0 after we had installed all current security patches from windowsupdate.com.

Comments

IE exploits

[pne.livejournal.com]

I believe with most of them, you're only vulnerable if you use IE to browse the Internet (or another program that uses IE as an ActiveX control), but I've seen at least one security bulletin by Microsoft that said you were vulnerable if you had it installed. (That was the one that caused me, reluctantly, to upgrade my IE to 6.0 on my old Windows 98 box.)