As part of the March edition of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft plans on pushing out 5 bulletins - two of which cover critical flaws.

One of the updates deals with a previously patched 0-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Tuesday’s patch will be a more permanent fix. The other critical issue affects all supported versions of Windows.

These updates arrive a month before the final April update that will signal the end of support for XP.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at cloud security firm Qualys, writes: “Windows XP is affected by all five updates and there is really no reason to expect this picture to change: Windows XP will continue to be impacted by the majority of vulnerabilities found in the Windows ecosystem, but you will not be able to address the issues anymore. Windows XP is getting its penultimate update and is now very close (just over 30 days) to its declared end of life date."

Qualys still sees a large number of systems running XP, from 25 per cent in its consumer-oriented service to 20 per cent on its enterprise-oriented QualysGuard service.

Windows XP users can expect to see nagging pop-ups beginning March 8th.