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For a long time, the experience of patching Sun’s Java software has been less than pleasant. The updates were huge and time consuming, the patching instructions were a mess and, even worse, Sun never removed older, vulnerable versions from the patched machine.

Now it appears that things have been fixed. For starters, the company is offering this very important link that allows users to run a quick scan to determine whether the Java environment installation is up to date.

For a long time, the experience of patching Sun’s Java software has been less than pleasant. The updates were huge and time consuming, the patching instructions were a mess and, even worse, Sun never removed older, vulnerable versions from the patched machine.

Now it appears that things have been fixed. For starters, the company is offering this very important link that allows users to run a quick scan to determine whether the Java environment installation is up to date.

 I ran the tool on a Vista installation and not only did it find and patch my Java, it actually removed all remnants of the Update 11 environment.

The update process still has a badware component.  Sun is bundling the MSN Toolbar with the Java patch and it’s pre-checked by default.

* Cross-posted to ZDNet Zero Day.