Some users have received the massive Office 2007 SP1 download that was released just last week via Windows Update. This is despite what Microsoft said about SP1 being a separate download until a later date, at least several months from now.

 

This has understandably caused some confusion to users and a number of IT professionals, as system administrators are already grappling with the increased number of security updates found in December’s patch Tuesday.

According to PC World:

Anyone running a preview copy of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was made available to all comers only Wednesday, will receive the Office 2007 upgrade automatically. Users of other in-beta Microsoft products, including Windows XP SP3, which is still in limited testing, will also be hit by the Office update, which weighs in at almost 220MB.

It appears that even if Office 2007 SP1 was manually installed, automatic update will automatically re-install the service pack.

You can read more about this from Microsoft’s official product team blog.