As promised, upon return from a trip to the frozen tundra of Northern Ontario, I am posting the latest updates from last week's release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3. For those who have been waiting to test the service pack until the post-SP3 cumulative update is available, you can get it in KB #959195 and read more about it over at the SQL Server Release Services blog. I apologize for being a few days behind, as the release was pushed out on Saturday, but I had very little access to anything during my trip.
For those of you keeping track, SP3 would bump your SQL Server instance to build # 9.00.4035, while the CU#1 update will bump it all the way up to 9.00.4207.
Also, if you are not ready to migrate to Service Pack 3, there is a security bulletin you should be aware of, surrounding an exploit using the extended stored procedure sp_replwritetovarbin. You can read about the issue in Microsoft Security Advisory (961040) and get some more background information at the MSRC and SVRD blogs. Note that SQL Server 2005 instances patched with SP3 or later are not affected by this vulnerability, nor is any RTM+ build of SQL Server 2008.