Misleading errors when zlib extension is missing

When I go to admin/logs/status, there is the following message:

Update status is unavailable. cron may need to be run.

Two problems:
a) This problem isn't caused by lack of cron run at all.
b) It's a "green" status message, and should be red.

When I eventually made my way to admin/logs/updates, I received:

Your system needs the zlib extension for this module to work. See http://us.php.net/manual/en/ref.zlib.php for more information.

So that sounds like more what the problem is. :)

And this might be related; when I click "Update manually" I get a white screen of death.