SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green does a far more thorough job than I can of summarizing Microsoft patch tuesday – October 2006 STATUS, (Tue, Oct 10th). “Overview of the October 2006 Microsoft patches and their status.”
A really quick summary: exploits in asp.net, in an IE “safe” ActiveX control, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, MSXML, Office, Publisher, the Server service, IPv6 and the Object Packager (wow! Haven't used that since OLE 1.0!). MS06-056-065. Get Patching! Try OpenOffice.org. Try FireFox. Think Differently. Good luck.