Next Tuesday is much more significant than the usual Patch Tuesday, because this crop of updates will be the last one for both Windows XP and Office 2003.

After April 8, most of the IT-enlightened world will be holding its collective breath, waiting for a likely deluge of hacks, attacks and malware based on vulnerabilities in Windows XP and Office 2003.

According to the official advance warning bulletin from Microsoft, this month’s updates will include patches for Office, Windows and Internet Explorer. Two of the patches are flagged as Critical.

One of the patches addresses the recently-discovered vulnerability in Word’s handling of RTF documents.

As usual, there’s a somewhat less technical overview of the upcoming updates on the MSRC blog.

The SANS InfoSec Handlers Diary blog has its own take on the upcoming updates.