Microsoft announced on Thursday that the company plans to release four patches for vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and another three patches to fix security issues in its Office productivity suite.

The patches, which will be released on Tuesday, fix flaws that have a maximum severity of critical, the software giant said in its monthly Advance Notification advisory. Some of the Windows patches will require a restart of the operating system.

Last month, Microsoft released a dozen security updates that fixed 21 flaws. Administrators should expect an increase in the number of patches released in coming months because of one security researcher's intent to release a browser bug every day in the month of July. The lion's share of the browsers bugs appear to affect Internet Explorer.

Microsoft's patches for its Office platform will come two weeks after its open-source competitor, OpenOffice, released fixes for three flaws in that productivity suite.

The coming patches do not seem to include an update to Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage software, an anti-piracy program that some users have criticized after the software giant labeled an improvement to the software as a critical patch.