Today’s Microsoft security patches include one for a potential remote exploit in… Wordpad? Yes, according to Security Bulletin MS04-041, there are two problems in the Word 6 converter that could be used to take control of your system. In addition to fixing those holes, they’ve disabled the converter.
I could understand if this were something like Emacs, which is practically its own operating system, but Wordpad is a bare minimum RTF editor.
What next? Are they going to find a plain-text hole in Notepad? Discover you can crash your system by dividing by 0.0000000000001 in Calculator? I know, looking at a malicious font in Character Map is going to be the next big virus vector.
Well WordPad is able to open MS Office documents (albeit quite badly!) so perhaps it might be something along those lines?
Rather scary how everything is so relied upon and intergrated into with Windows.