The hairline shows how long I've been in IT
We've all experienced users that blame absolutely everything on patching. My personal favorite is the person who blamed us for the problem that started just after she received my email announcing that patches would be applied the following week.
Many of the reports are more reasonable, because the problem really did start when patches were applied. This is frequently because some other change had file operations pending the next reboot, and many users only reboot when patches are applied. There's no way the users can distinguish those results from ones really caused by patches.
If this is a significant issue for your organization, one easy solution is to schedule a reboot of all workstations a few days before patches are deployed. You should exclude any that are in a special-handling collection, of course. That should make most unrelated issues turn up before patching starts, making them far easier to diagnose. This can also reduce the problem of SMS 2003 patch deployments causing a reboot as soon as the advertisement starts, as described in my earlier article on that subject.