They've patched it already. See at the link below:
https://www.cnet.com/forums/post/96ac7ef7-8e64-4092-a58f-58185f357225/
Hope this helps.
Grif
Deliberate? Hopefully not, but they have been pushing Windows 10 quite hard.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-7-meltdown-patch-opens-worse-vulnerability-install-march-updates-now/
"Microsoft's early patches for Intel's Meltdown CPU vulnerability created an even bigger problem in Windows 7 that allowed any unprivileged application to read kernel memory.
Microsoft's January and February patches stopped the Meltdown bug that exposed passwords in protected memory, but security researcher Ulf Frisk has discovered that the patches introduced a far worse kernel bug, which allows any process to read and write anywhere in kernel memory."

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