SAN FRANCISCO, July 19 — Microsoft reported a 7 percent rise in quarterly profit and earnings that matched Wall Street’s forecasts on Thursday, despite a substantial charge for fixing defects in its Xbox video-game machine.

The company, the world’s largest software maker, attributed the strong performance to continued brisk adoption of its Windows Vista operating system and the newest release of Microsoft Office, as well as to overall strong demand from business customers.

Microsoft’s profit for the fourth quarter was $3.04 billion, or 31 cents a share, compared with $2.83 billion, or 28 cents a share, in the quarter a year earlier.

Without the charge, earnings were 39 cents a share, a 26 percent increase from the period last year.

Revenue was $13.37 billion for the quarter ended June 30, a 13 percent increase over $11.8 billion in the period last year.

Analysts had forecast a profit of 39 cents a share on $13.28 billion in revenue, according to Thomson Financial.

The results were announced after the stock market’s close. Shares declined 2 percent in after-hours trading, after rising 59 cents, to close at $31.51 in the regular session.

“It was a pretty robust quarter,” said Charles Di Bona, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein. “There were no surprises and they cleared the air on all the near-term issues.”

Trip Chowdhry, an analyst at Global Equities Research, said the stock was most likely down because some investors were still looking for Microsoft to continue the heady growth of its early days. “The company did well despite being a mature company in a mature market with falling prices,” he said.

For the fiscal year, Microsoft posted revenue of $51.12 billion, a 15 percent increase over the prior year. Earnings for the year were $1.42 a share, or $1.49 excluding one-time items.

“Our results this quarter cap off an extremely strong fiscal year for the company,” said Christopher P. Liddell, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. “We have healthy core businesses and are strategically investing in growth opportunities.”

For fiscal year 2008, Microsoft raised its forecast for earnings by a penny a share, to a range of $1.69 to $1.73, and for revenue by about $300 million, to $56.8 million to $57.8 million.

Microsoft executives said the company expected to earn 38 cents to 40 cents a share on $12.4 billion to $12.6 billion in sales during the first quarter, on the high end of Wall Street’s forecast of 38 cents a share on revenue of $12.51 billion.

Strong momentum in Microsoft’s core products continued through the fourth quarter. Revenue in the Client unit, which includes Windows, increased 14 percent, to $3.81 billion. Sales of Microsoft Office 2007 increased 20 percent in the fourth quarter to add $600 million to Microsoft’s revenue.

Much of the growth was driven by large-volume business customers, the company said. Colleen Healy, senior director of investor relations, said in an interview that renewals of long-term contracts were up 25 percent, a sign of continued growth.

The company incurred a charge of $1.06 billion for the anticipated cost of repairing a hardware defect in some of its Xbox 360 game consoles, a problem that may have affected as many as a third of the 11.6 million units sold.

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that its top gaming executive, Peter Moore, was leaving Microsoft to run the sports division of Electronic Arts, the independent video game publisher, though company executives denied that his departure was related to the Xbox’s engineering problems. Don Mattrick, a former Electronic Arts studio chief, will take Mr. Moore’s job at Microsoft.

Microsoft’s online business reported an increase in sales but a widening loss, as it continued to battle Google and Yahoo.

The division’s loss in the fourth quarter grew to $239 million from $187 million in the period last year.

Ms. Healy said the revenue in the division had met Microsoft’s goal, as the company recorded a 33 percent increase in advertising.

Microsoft’s server and tools division posted sales of $3.08 billion in the fourth quarter, up from $2.69 billion a year ago.