The Windows Update
Wall of Shame

The March 2026 Patch Tuesday update broke Microsoft account sign-in across Teams Free, OneDrive, Edge, Word, and Excel. The failure came with a deliberately misleading error — “You’ll need the Internet for this. It doesn’t look like you’re connected to the Internet” — even on fully connected machines, sending users and IT admins on pointless network troubleshooting dead-ends. Microsoft confirmed the issue and released an out-of-band fix (KB5085516) on March 23, nearly two weeks after the damage was done.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.notebookcheck.net
• www.windowscentral.com
• x.com

The February 2026 hotpatch for Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024 broke the Reset this PC option — and the March hotpatch (KB5079420) shipped with the same bug intact. Choosing either “Keep my files” or “Remove everything” sends the machine to a black screen before silently aborting and rebooting back to the desktop with “There was a problem resetting your PC. No changes were made.” No data is lost, but the recovery path you’d reach for in an emergency simply doesn’t work. The issue only affects Windows Autopatch-managed commercial devices with hotpatch enabled — consumer PCs are unaffected. The fix required installing a separate March Safe OS Dynamic Update (KB5079471) rather than being bundled into the next hotpatch.

• support.microsoft.com
• www.neowin.net

The January preview update, intended to fix the chaos from KB5073455, introduced its own fresh set of regressions. Integrated laptop cameras stopped working entirely. Explorer.exe crashed, taking the taskbar and Start menu with it into the void. Brief black screens appeared. Some systems needed recovery mode to boot. Storage settings suddenly demanded admin permissions for no reason. Temporary Files cleanup broke. It was the fix that needed a fix that needed a fix — a recursive loop of incompetence that wouldn’t resolve until February’s Patch Tuesday arrived to break new things.

• www.neowin.net
• www.windowslatest.com

The second emergency patch in seven days. Computing.co.uk made that their headline. KB5078127 finally fixed the cloud file I/O hangs that were freezing Outlook and any app that touched OneDrive or Dropbox. In exchange, it introduced a new bug: the password icon vanished from the lock screen sign-in options. A cosmetic bug, sure, but a fitting symbol — Microsoft’s emergency fix to restore functionality removed the icon that represents authentication. The UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME issue — the most severe problem from KB5074109, the one bricking PCs entirely — remained unfixed through both emergency patches. That wouldn’t be addressed for another 17 days, when February’s Patch Tuesday arrived with its own fresh set of catastrophes.

• support.microsoft.com
• www.windowscentral.com
• www.windowslatest.com
• www.computing.co.uk

The third emergency patch in eleven days for January’s Patch Tuesday disaster. KB5078132 was supposed to fix cloud storage file access problems and Outlook PST corruption introduced by the earlier updates — apps would hang when opening files stored on OneDrive or Dropbox, and Outlook would freeze or corrupt PST files. It also carried forward the Secure Launch shutdown fix that still didn’t fully work on all systems. Neowin’s headline said it all: “Microsoft’s emergency patch broke Windows 11/10 further.” At this point, the emergency fixes needed their own emergency fixes.

• support.microsoft.com
• www.neowin.net

Four days after KB5074109 broke everything, Microsoft rushed out their first emergency out-of-band patch. KB5077744 fixed exactly two things: Remote Desktop sign-in and the Secure Launch shutdown bug. It did not fix unbootable PCs. It did not fix Outlook freezing. It did not fix cloud storage hangs. It did not fix Citrix. It did not fix NVIDIA black screens. It did not fix File Explorer. Slashdot’s headline: “Microsoft Forced to Issue Emergency Out-of-Band Windows Update.” The emphasis was on “forced” — as if fixing the things you broke is an imposition. Seven other issues from KB5074109 remained unfixed, and users got to wait another week for emergency patch number two.

• support.microsoft.com
• tech.slashdot.org

Four days after January’s Patch Tuesday broke shutdown and hibernation on Secure Launch systems, Microsoft rushed out this emergency fix. It didn’t work. Administrators reported no improvement on many affected systems — PCs still restarted instead of shutting down, laptops still cooked in bags. The Remote Desktop authentication fix was equally hit-or-miss. Microsoft would need yet another emergency patch (KB5078132) a week later, which also wouldn’t fully resolve it. The actual fix wouldn’t arrive until February’s Patch Tuesday, a full month after the original break.

• support.microsoft.com
• windowsforum.com

January’s Patch Tuesday broke the most fundamental computer operation: turning it off. Systems with Secure Launch (System Guard) enabled would restart instead of shutting down. Hibernation and sleep were equally broken. On laptops, closing the lid did nothing — devices stayed fully active inside bags and sleeves, draining batteries and risking thermal damage. Intel Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake systems were particularly afflicted. Remote Desktop authentication also failed. Microsoft needed two emergency out-of-band patches (KB5077797 and KB5078132), neither of which fully fixed the issue, before February’s Patch Tuesday finally resolved it. Three patches to fix shutdown.

• www.guru3d.com
• betanews.com
• www.notebookcheck.net

The December preview update turned dark mode into a light show. File Explorer flashed white screens and went blank when dark mode was enabled, defeating the entire purpose of the feature. Intel Arc B580 GPU owners got Blue Screens of Death. Installation failures hit with error 0x80070306. The password icon on the lock screen became invisible — a recurring Microsoft favorite. Performance slowed to a crawl. At least the dark mode issue was fixed quickly in December’s Patch Tuesday, because nothing says quality assurance like shipping a preview update that breaks a basic display preference.

• www.windowslatest.com
• 4sysops.com

November’s update brought installation failures with errors 0x800f0306 and 0x800f081f — ASUS ROG Ally users were particularly afflicted. File Explorer’s search on SMB network shares stopped returning results, making shared drives unsearchable. Windows Server 2025 became, in the words of one Microsoft community post, “not useable anymore” after the update. Bluetooth broke on handheld devices. The update that was supposed to fix October’s problems created a fresh batch of November problems, continuing the proud tradition of each month’s fix being next month’s bug.

• www.windowslatest.com
• techcommunity.microsoft.com

The October preview update turned Task Manager into a zombie process factory. Clicking the X button to close Task Manager didn’t actually close it — instead, it spawned a hidden background instance consuming 20-25 MB of RAM. Each “close” created another ghost copy. Over time, dozens of phantom Task Manager processes accumulated, degrading system performance. The tool designed to help you manage runaway processes became a runaway process itself. WSL mirrored networking also broke with VPN clients like Cisco AnyConnect, because why not.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The September preview update broke HTTP.sys, the kernel-mode HTTP driver that powers IIS and localhost connections. Web developers found their local development servers returning ERR_CONNECTION_RESET and ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR. Production IIS websites on affected servers went down. Autodesk Vault broke. DRM-protected content — digital TV, Blu-ray and DVD playback apps — stopped working entirely. Microsoft deployed a Known Issue Rollback for enterprise, but the permanent fix didn’t arrive until October’s Patch Tuesday. Somehow, an update managed to break both web servers and movie night simultaneously.

• www.neowin.net
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

This out-of-band update, released to fix Office and App-V crashes, carried forward a bug from September’s Patch Tuesday that broke SMBv1 file sharing over NetBIOS. Legacy NAS devices and older servers using SMBv1 via NetBIOS became inaccessible — shared files and folders simply vanished from the network. Microsoft’s workaround was to force SMB over TCP port 445 instead, which is essentially telling users to stop using the protocol Microsoft broke. Yes, SMBv1 is deprecated. No, that doesn’t help the countless small businesses still running decade-old NAS boxes that only speak SMBv1.

• windowsforum.com

September’s update broke DRM video playback — Blu-ray apps, DVD players, and digital TV applications all failed with copyright protection errors or black screens. The Enhanced Video Renderer couldn’t handle HDCP enforcement anymore. Meanwhile, SMBv1 file sharing stopped working entirely with repeated “System error 86” credential prompts, even with correct passwords. Legacy NAS devices and printers became inaccessible. Some machines had their network profiles silently reset to “Public,” disabling file and printer sharing. Microsoft managed to break both watching movies and accessing network files in a single update.

• www.neowin.net
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The August preview update for Windows 11 24H2 broke DRM-protected content playback — digital TV, Blu-ray, and DVD apps showed copyright protection errors, black screens, and unexpected stops. The update also switched Windows printing from MSVCRT to Universal CRT, intentionally breaking print clients running anything older than Windows 10 2004. MSI application repairs failed with Error 1730 for non-admin users, affecting Office and Autodesk products. The password icon vanished from the lock screen again, making its recurring disappearance the “Where’s Waldo?” of Windows bugs. Microsoft eventually deployed a Known Issue Rollback a month later.

• support.microsoft.com

August’s Patch Tuesday broke Windows Recovery — the last resort for fixing a broken Windows installation. Attempting to “Reset this PC” would fail and roll back, leaving users trapped with whatever problems drove them to reset in the first place. Excessive UAC prompts appeared everywhere for good measure. Microsoft had to issue an emergency out-of-band patch KB5066189 a week later, because breaking the recovery system is the one thing you really shouldn’t do when your updates regularly require recovery.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The July preview update for Windows 11 24H2 conjured phantom folders on the desktop — mysterious empty directories that appeared from nowhere. Installations stalled at 58%. Green screen restarts plagued users. Surface Pro 11 keyboards stopped working entirely, turning a laptop into a very expensive tablet. File Explorer’s Home view collapsed to showing a single lonely folder. It was the kind of update where every user encountered a different, equally baffling bug.

• support.microsoft.com
• learn.microsoft.com

July’s Patch Tuesday broke the Microsoft Changjie input method, rendering Traditional Chinese text input impossible on Windows 11 22H2/23H2. The spacebar stopped responding during character composition. The conversion candidate window refused to display. Users could not form or select words. For millions of Traditional Chinese users, their computers became incapable of typing in their language. The fix took two weeks to arrive in KB5062663, during which affected users had to find creative workarounds for the basic act of text input on a computer in 2025.

• support.microsoft.com

The June preview update broke Alt+Tab in fullscreen games — one of the most fundamental keyboard shortcuts in Windows. Switching away from a game caused resolution changes and cursor lag, making the transition between game and desktop a disorienting mess. External monitors developed a green tint, turning everything into a Matrix-themed fever dream. Windows Firewall started throwing false Event ID 2042 warnings. CJK text rendered blurry in Chromium browsers at 96 DPI. Microsoft’s advice was essentially “you can safely ignore it,” which is a bold stance on monitors turning green.

• www.windowslatest.com
• windowsforum.com

June’s security update caused Windows to restart whenever launching games with Easy Anti-Cheat — primarily Fortnite, the most played game in the world. Microsoft took the unprecedented step of throttling a security update’s rollout while they scrambled a fix, which came via OOB patch the very next day. The update also completely removed Microsoft Print to PDF from the system, with attempts to re-enable it returning error 0x800f0922. Oh, and the update was shipped with the wrong timestamp in its metadata, causing organizations with update delay policies to unknowingly remain unpatched for an extra 10 days. A trifecta of incompetence.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The May preview update for Windows 11 24H2 achieved a perfect loop of futility. Installations stuck at 8% or 46%, consuming high CPU while accomplishing nothing, then failing and trying again ad infinitum. The WUSA standalone installer broke with ERROR_BAD_PATHNAME when deploying from network shares, crippling enterprise deployment workflows. Systems were trapped in an endless cycle of attempting to install an update that couldn’t install, burning power and patience in equal measure.

• learn.microsoft.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The May update shipped with fancy new AI features for File Explorer. It also shipped with a File Explorer that freezes solid — toolbar buttons become completely unclickable, mouse and keyboard inputs randomly stop working, and the whole thing locks up tighter than a Windows license agreement. For those lucky enough to avoid the freeze, the update simply refused to install, offering a smorgasbord of error codes: 0x800f0991, 0x80070002, 0x800f081f, and more. Microsoft’s official support was, as Neowin put it, “useless.” At least the AI search works great in the File Explorer you can’t interact with.

• www.berrall.com
• www.neowin.net
• www.windowslatest.com

April’s Patch Tuesday blocked enterprise WSUS upgrades to Windows 11 24H2 with error 0x80240069, leaving IT departments unable to migrate their fleets through their own update infrastructure. As a bonus, it silently created a mysterious empty C:\inetpub folder on every single Windows 11 system — Microsoft’s idea of “security hardening” for a web server directory that 99% of users have never needed. Admins who deleted the folder found it kept coming back. The WSUS blockage required either waiting for the May patch or deploying a Known Issue Rollback Group Policy, because nothing says “enterprise-ready” like needing a special policy to undo your update infrastructure breaking itself.

• borncity.com
• www.neowin.net

The March 2025 update introduced a very specific kind of torture: RDP sessions that work perfectly for exactly 65 seconds, then disconnect. UDP-based Remote Desktop connections from Windows 11 24H2 to Windows Server 2016 or earlier would drop like clockwork just over a minute in. IT admins managing older servers got to experience the joy of reconnecting every minute while trying to troubleshoot why their connections kept dropping. The fix took over two weeks to arrive.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• borncity.com

March’s Patch Tuesday turned USB dual-mode printers into random text generators. Instead of printing your documents, they’d spit out pages of garbage characters, raw network commands, and unintelligible data — like your printer was having a conversation with the void. Copilot also silently unpinned and uninstalled itself for some users, which honestly might have been the most user-friendly thing this update did. The printer chaos took two weeks to fix with KB5053657 on March 25th.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.neowin.net

Microsoft released KB5052093 for Windows 11 24H2, watched it fail to install for users with errors 0x800f0983 and 0x80070005, pulled it, and then re-released it — at which point it still failed to install for many users. Those who managed to get it installed were rewarded with choppy, laggy system performance and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 refusing to launch. The rare update that managed to be broken both before and after installation.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• undercodenews.com

February’s update decided cameras are overrated. After installing KB5051987, Windows stops recognizing that your camera is turned on, rendering video calls into a guessing game of “can they see me?” Meanwhile, File Explorer refuses to open folders — clicking Desktop, Documents, or Pictures does absolutely nothing. The sidebar arrows to expand subfolders? Also nothing. It’s like File Explorer decided to take the month off. At least the update also introduced “faulty preview animations” in the taskbar, so you have something broken to look at while your files are inaccessible.

• www.windowslatest.com
• windowsforum.com
• windowsforum.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

February’s Patch Tuesday continued the USB printer saga — dual-mode printers kept printing random garbage text and network commands instead of actual documents, a bug that had been reported since at least January and wouldn’t be fixed until late March. AppLocker rules stopped working on multi-app kiosk configurations, breaking enterprise digital signage and shared terminals. OpenSSH still refused to start, a gift that kept giving since October 2024. Four months of a broken SSH service on a modern operating system.

• www.neowin.net
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The January preview update for Windows 11 22H2/23H2 joined the USB printer garbage party — dual-mode printers started printing random text and network commands instead of documents. OpenSSH continued its four-month streak of refusing to start, a bug Microsoft had acknowledged back in October but apparently couldn’t prioritize fixing on the operating system used by most of the planet. The printer issue wouldn’t be resolved until late March, giving users nearly two months of wondering what their printer was trying to tell them.

• www.ninjaone.com
• learn.microsoft.com

The January preview update for Windows 11 24H2 introduced a persistent spinning cursor that appeared every 30 seconds even when the system was completely idle — a metronome of incompetence. Remote Desktop sessions froze entirely, with mouse and keyboard becoming unresponsive. File Explorer crashed and hung. Hyper-V broke during RDP sessions. Audio devices vanished from certain applications. Adobe Premiere Pro’s drag-and-drop broke on multi-monitor setups. Login performance degraded severely. It was less of an update and more of a comprehensive demonstration of how many things can break at once.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.pcworld.com

The January 2025 Patch Tuesday update fails to install on any system running Citrix Session Recording Agent, rolling back with the wonderfully helpful “Something didn’t go as planned. No need to worry — undoing changes.” The Citrix service locks driver files that the update needs to modify, creating a deadlock that neither Microsoft nor Citrix seemed to have tested for. The workaround? Manually stop the Citrix service before every Windows Update. Enterprise IT admins everywhere added another step to their already-joyful patching procedures.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.neowin.net
• support.citrix.com

January’s Patch Tuesday greeted Windows 11 22H2/23H2 users with black screens after installation — just a cursor on a void where your desktop used to be. OpenSSH continued its unbroken streak of being broken since October, now entering its fourth month of the sshd service silently refusing to start. Bluetooth file transfers broke, requiring a full uninstall-and-reinstall dance via DISM cleanup to restore functionality. A fitting start to the new year.

• learn.microsoft.com
• windowsforum.com

December’s update brought a festive collection of breakage. The Start menu became completely unresponsive, particularly in VDI and Citrix environments. Wi-Fi stopped functioning entirely on some systems. The update got stuck during installation, restarting in loops. TCP resets interrupted network connectivity. Displays appeared washed out. The “Safely Remove Hardware” icon showed phantom network adapters. The workaround for the Start menu issue? A registry edit targeting StartMenuExperienceHost.exe. Merry Christmas, here’s a registry key to unwrap.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.ghacks.net
• www.neowin.net

November’s update continued the proud tradition of KB5044284 by also blocking all future security updates when installed via USB or CD media. The update itself would get stuck at various percentages — 6%, 35%, 40% — pick your favorite number, it’ll freeze there. Microsoft confirmed the issue and said it would be fixed in the December update. So for two months, systems installed from media were frozen in time, unable to receive security patches, like a Windows XP machine in a dentist’s office.

• www.neowin.net
• www.windowslatest.com
• support.microsoft.com

Microsoft confirmed that this update broke OpenSSH. The sshd service silently refused to start — no error messages, no logging, just nothing. Every SSH connection attempt simply failed. This affected enterprise customers, IoT deployments, education systems, and anyone who relied on remote shell access to Windows machines. Microsoft’s fix? Manually adjust ACL permissions on C:\ProgramData\ssh and C:\ProgramData\ssh\logs. The bug persisted through every update from October 2024 through March 2025 — five months of broken SSH on the world’s most popular desktop operating system.

• www.neowin.net
• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• learn.microsoft.com

The October preview update for Windows 11 24H2 broke Task Manager — the one tool every Windows user reaches for when something goes wrong. After installing KB5044384, Task Manager stopped displaying running tasks entirely, making process management impossible. You couldn’t see what was running, couldn’t end hung processes, couldn’t monitor resource usage. Installations failed left and right too, stalling at 90-95% with errors 0x800f0922 and 0xc015001a. Microsoft advised waiting for November’s Patch Tuesday, which is one way to handle breaking the tool people use to diagnose your broken updates.

• www.guru3d.com
• www.windowslatest.com
• learn.microsoft.com

The first update for Windows 11 24H2 was a hat trick of dysfunction. First, it fails to install with error 0x800736b3, getting stuck at 40% or rolling back endlessly. Second, it breaks OpenSSH — the sshd service refuses to start with Error 1067 because Microsoft changed folder permissions that OpenSSH didn’t expect. Third, and most impressively, if you installed Windows from USB media with this update baked in, it permanently blocks all future updates from installing. Microsoft’s fix for the update that blocks updates? Install a different update. Which you can’t. Because updates are blocked.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.neowin.net
• github.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The October Patch Tuesday security update broke OpenSSH on Windows 11 22H2/23H2 — and since it was a mandatory security update, users couldn’t just skip it. The sshd service failed to start silently, killing all SSH connectivity. But that wasn’t all: Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections became unstable, desktop thumbnails and icons disappeared, and the Properties right-click context menu broke. Installation failures piled up with four different error codes. The SSH breakage wouldn’t be properly fixed for five months, making this the update that kept taking.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• github.com
• www.windowslatest.com

September’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2/23H2 was a greatest hits compilation of breakage. Linux dual-boot systems stopped booting entirely, greeted with “Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation” — Microsoft’s Secure Boot update decided that Linux wasn’t secure enough to exist. File Explorer crashed when opened from the taskbar. Run as Administrator (UAC) broke due to DLL issues, meaning you couldn’t elevate privileges to fix the other problems. Enterprise systems hit Unified Write Filter deadlocks with SCCM. SAP EasyDocuments stopped working. The workaround for the Linux issue involved disabling Secure Boot entirely, which rather defeats the purpose of a Secure Boot update.

• www.pcworld.com
• www.windowslatest.com

September’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 24H2 introduced “checkpoint cumulative updates” for Copilot+ PCs — a new servicing model that promptly broke the ability to install any future updates. Systems that had added Feature on Demand or Language Packs from local sources on top of the checkpoint update would fail all subsequent updates with “Operation is not supported” errors. The fix was to manually re-download and reinstall KB5043080 from the Microsoft Update Catalog, which really drives home the irony of Windows Update breaking Windows Update.

• www.windowslatest.com

The August preview update continued the SBAT crusade against Linux dual-boot systems while adding new problems. Bluetooth devices disconnected randomly. File Explorer’s navigation pane stopped refreshing properly. Resuming from hibernation failed. Memory leaks degraded performance over time. SCCM task deadlocks hit enterprise deployments. It was the second August update to break Linux booting, at which point it was clear Microsoft’s “this won’t affect dual-boot” promise was less a commitment and more a suggestion.

• support.microsoft.com

August’s Patch Tuesday applied a Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT) policy that bricked Linux dual-boot setups across the board. Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distributions refused to boot with a “Security Policy Violation” error — Microsoft had effectively decided that your Linux partition was a security threat. Meanwhile, TCP/IP connections suffered high CPU usage and packet loss, degrading network performance system-wide. The BitLocker recovery screen boot issue from July persisted. Profile picture changes failed with error 0x80070520 — because even the simplest features aren’t safe from Patch Tuesday.

• support.microsoft.com
• www.windowslatest.com

July’s Patch Tuesday greeted users with an unexpected BitLocker recovery screen on boot — the kind that demands a 48-character recovery key most people have never seen and certainly didn’t write down. This wasn’t a security event; the update just confused BitLocker into thinking something had changed. The issue hit across all July 2024 Patch Tuesday updates, affecting multiple Windows versions simultaneously. Windows N edition users also lost their taskbar entirely. Automation scripts broke because Windows Installer silently changed its UAC behavior. The BitLocker fix arrived a month later in August, by which point countless users had already factory reset their machines.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.neowin.net

The July security update decided that users needed a surprise BitLocker recovery quiz on boot. After installing, PCs — especially Intel systems with Modern Standby — would boot straight to the BitLocker recovery key prompt, locking users out of their own machines. Hope you saved that 48-digit recovery key somewhere! Most people hadn’t, because Windows enabled Device Encryption automatically without making it obvious. Microsoft acknowledged the issue affected “some” devices. It mostly affected the ones people were trying to use.

• www.neowin.net
• www.tomshardware.com
• www.laptopmag.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

May’s Patch Tuesday continued the VPN connectivity saga that had plagued Windows 11 for months. VPN connections dropped or refused to establish. The Start Menu and Windows Search stopped responding entirely. Explorer.exe crashed on reboot. Installation stalled at 70%. For remote workers who depended on VPN access, this mandatory security update effectively cut them off from their workplace — the digital equivalent of changing the locks while everyone’s at lunch.

• www.windowslatest.com

The April 2024 update broke VPN connections across multiple protocols including SSTP, L2TP/IPsec, and PPTP. Enterprise users who rely on VPN for remote work were suddenly unable to connect to their corporate networks. Microsoft acknowledged the issue affected “some” users — it was, in fact, most of them. The fix took three weeks, during which time “just come into the office” was the official workaround.

• support.microsoft.com

The update that added Start Menu ads also broke your computer. VPN connectivity failed. File Explorer crashed when navigating to Home or Gallery. External monitors stopped being recognized. Mouse performance became laggy. Profile picture changes broke with error 0x80070520. Microsoft chose this update — the one that injected advertisements into the Start Menu — to also ship with a basket of functionality regressions. At least the ads worked flawlessly.

• www.windowslatest.com

The February preview update failed to install so spectacularly that Microsoft officially told users not to install it. Installations failed with errors 0x800f0922, 0x800f0982, and 0x80070002, rolling back at 96% completion — tantalizingly close to success before crashing back to square one. The workaround was to manually delete a hidden C:\$WinREAgent folder, because of course the fix for a broken Windows update is to dig around in hidden system directories. When the company that made the update publicly advises against installing the update, you know quality assurance has left the building.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.gizchina.com

The February Patch Tuesday update delivered a three-course meal of misery. First course: your taskbar disappears, leaving a blank void where your app icons used to be. Second course: File Explorer crashes whenever it feels like it. Third course: the update itself fails to install at 96% with error 0x800F0922, because a hidden C:\$WinREAgent folder left behind by a previous botched update blocks installation. The fix was to manually delete a hidden system folder. Peak Windows.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.neowin.net
• www.neowin.net
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

January 2024’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2/23H2 refused to install with a trio of errors: 0x800f081f, 0x80188309, and 0x8007000d. Users who managed to force it through were rewarded with audio stuttering during gaming and streaming — the sound crackling and cutting out mid-game. Wi-Fi adapter connectivity became unreliable. A security update that couldn’t install, and when it did, made your computer worse at the two things people actually enjoy doing with it.

• www.windowslatest.com

November’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2/23H2 failed to install at 30-37% with a rotating cast of errors: 0x80070002, 0x800F0922, and 0x800f081f. This was particularly dangerous because the update contained fixes for three actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities — meaning the install failures left systems exposed to known attacks. Users who did manage to install it found File Explorer refused to open. So you were either unpatched against active threats, or patched but unable to browse your own files. Choose your adventure.

• www.howto-connect.com

October’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2 crashed File Explorer on launch — the most frequently used application in Windows. Starfield and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 crashed to desktop. AMD GPU profiles and fan curves reset themselves every reboot, forcing gamers to reconfigure their graphics settings daily. Virtual machines with Secure Boot wouldn’t start. Installation failures piled up. The update managed to simultaneously ruin productivity (Explorer), gaming (Starfield), and development (VMs) — a trifecta of misery covering essentially every computer use case.

• www.windowslatest.com

The “Moment 4” update greeted users with a black screen on login — explorer.exe simply refused to start, leaving a blank void where a desktop should be. The search box, in a surreal twist, rendered itself as just the letter “C” in the taskbar. File Explorer became sluggish with excessive memory consumption. AMD driver profiles reset on every reboot. Desktop icons stopped responding to clicks. The update that was supposed to bring exciting new features to Windows 11 instead brought an existential void and a search box that could only express a single letter of the alphabet.

• www.windowslatest.com

September’s update managed to break the three things you need most: Start menu, File Explorer, and Search. All three became completely unresponsive. As an encore, the update silently disabled .NET 3.5 Framework, breaking every legacy business application that depended on it. SQL applications crashed on both client and server. Gamers got TDR errors and blue screens. The update contained “24 fixes” according to the changelog — it just also contained about 24 new bugs to go with them.

• borncity.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

August’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2 turned explorer.exe into a freeze-and-crash loop. Network adapters stopped being recognized, cutting off internet access entirely. Remote Desktop disconnected randomly. VPN connections failed. Microsoft Defender — the built-in security software — broke. Installation stalled at 96%. The update managed to disable both your ability to browse files locally and connect to anything remotely, while also disabling your antivirus. A comprehensive demonstration of how to make a computer both useless and vulnerable in one step.

• www.windowslatest.com

The July preview update introduced a repeating screen-flash loop at the Windows sign-in screen. The display would flash continuously, rendering the system completely inaccessible through normal means. Users couldn’t type their password, couldn’t click anything, couldn’t do anything but watch their screen strobe. The only escape was Ctrl+Alt+Delete to reach Task Manager — assuming you could time the keyboard shortcut between flashes. A sign-in screen that actively prevents signing in is a bold design choice.

• techcommunity.microsoft.com

July’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 21H2 turned explorer.exe into a perpetual crash-and-restart loop. The Windows shell would crash, the desktop and taskbar would vanish, explorer.exe would restart, and then crash again — every few seconds, indefinitely. Systems with ExplorerPatcher or StartAllBack were particularly hit. The computer remained technically “running” in the same way a car spinning its wheels in mud is technically “driving.” StartAllBack pushed a compatibility fix before Microsoft did.

• mspoweruser.com

June’s update changed Windows exploit protection in a way that made Malwarebytes’ anti-exploit module think Chrome was malicious. Chrome processes would run in the background, but the browser window never appeared. Given that Malwarebytes has millions of users and Chrome has about 65% browser market share, this was a significant number of people who suddenly couldn’t browse the web. Trying to uninstall the update via WSUS produced a “catastrophic error.” The world’s most popular browser, broken by the world’s most popular antivirus, caused by the world’s most popular operating system’s update.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.neowin.net

May’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 21H2 crashed explorer.exe into an endless loop for users with shell customization apps. But the subtler and arguably worse bug was that 32-bit large-address-aware applications had intermittent file save and copy failures. Office 32-bit showed “Document not saved” errors — the kind of silent data loss that users might not notice until they try to reopen their work. Your files looked like they saved. They didn’t. Microsoft quietly documented the issue in the support article while users discovered it the hard way.

• support.microsoft.com

May’s update didn’t just slow down VPN connections — it obliterated them. L2TP/IPsec VPN speeds dropped from 16 MB/s to literally zero. Connection times ballooned from seconds to 30 seconds, when they connected at all. SFTP over VPN became completely unusable. Businesses relying on VPN for their entire remote workforce watched productivity evaporate. The Windows Security app also started crashing with “grey and black boxes” instead of its UI, because apparently Microsoft’s own security app couldn’t survive Microsoft’s own update.

• www.windowslatest.com
• windowsreport.com

April’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2 degraded SSD performance and increased boot times — on the storage technology specifically designed for speed. Explorer.exe crashed. Windows Security UI displayed incorrect TPM 2.0 and LSA information, causing security-conscious users to panic about their hardware status. Desktop icons became unresponsive or disappeared entirely. The taskbar’s auto-hide feature malfunctioned. Rare BSODs rounded out the experience. An update that made your fast storage slow, your desktop unclickable, and your security status unreliable.

• www.windowslatest.com

The March 2023 update discovered a creative new way to slow down your PC: cripple your SSD. NVMe drives that should read at 7000 MB/s were reduced to around 1000 MB/s when copying files over SMB. Microsoft managed to make cutting-edge storage hardware perform like it was from 2015. As a bonus, the update also delivered Blue Screens of Death, broken Bluetooth connectivity, and install failures with a variety of error codes. Third-party tools like Start11 and ExplorerPatcher were also broken, because why stop at first-party damage?

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.guru3d.com

February’s Patch Tuesday made applications hang on startup when Windows Defender was disabled — punishing users for not using Microsoft’s security product. WSUS distribution failed, leaving enterprise IT unable to deploy updates. 32-bit app file operations broke. SMB network file copies slowed to a crawl. The update effectively penalized both individual users (app hangs) and enterprises (WSUS failure, slow network copies) simultaneously, ensuring nobody was spared.

• borncity.com

The Windows 11 21H2 version of December’s Patch Tuesday carried the same AMD Ryzen random freezing issue as KB5021255. Systems would lock up for minutes at a time without warning. Installation failures hit at 97-100% completion. The Start menu broke with third-party customization apps. Microsoft achieved impressive consistency: the same AMD-specific bug shipped across both supported Windows 11 versions on the same day, doubling the blast radius.

• www.windowslatest.com

December’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2 caused AMD Ryzen CPUs to randomly freeze for minutes at a time — the system would lock up completely, unresponsive to any input, before eventually recovering as if nothing happened. Installation failed at 99% with error 0x800f081f, taunting users with near-completion before crashing. Task Manager’s color rendering broke, making CPU/memory graphs unreadable. AMD users, already accustomed to being second-class citizens in the Windows ecosystem, got a special holiday gift of random system paralysis.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.neowin.net

October’s update broke TLS and SSL across every supported Windows version simultaneously. Encrypted connections would fail when receiving a record followed by a partial record smaller than 5 bytes. Citrix clients couldn’t talk to NetScalers. Enterprise HTTPS applications dropped connections. Every single actively supported Windows release was affected — that’s some impressive regression coverage. Microsoft needed emergency OOB patches within a week to restore the ability to do HTTPS, which in 2022 was approximately all web traffic.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.neowin.net

October’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 22H2 introduced up to a 40% throughput loss when copying large files over SMB network shares. Enterprise provisioning packages also broke. The SMB performance regression wouldn’t be fixed until February 2023 — over four months of degraded network file transfers. Microsoft “finally fixes” was BleepingComputer’s headline when the fix arrived, emphasis on “finally.” Four months to fix making file copies slower is a pace that would make the file copies themselves look fast.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com

Microsoft accidentally published a preview update to WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), the enterprise update management system. Organizations with auto-approve or auto-decline rules had their security update deployment policies corrupted — critical security patches were expired before they could be deployed. Preview updates are optional and never supposed to reach WSUS. Microsoft’s quality control failed at the distribution level: the update itself might have been fine, but shipping it through the wrong channel broke enterprise security patching workflows across organizations worldwide.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com

Microsoft pushed a Secure Boot DBX update to block vulnerable UEFI bootloaders. The update modified the boot environment just enough to make BitLocker think someone was tampering with the system, demanding the recovery key on next boot. The same recovery key that most users didn’t know existed, let alone saved. Microsoft’s advice to prevent the issue: manually suspend BitLocker via command line before installing the update. Because average users definitely know what manage-bde -protectors -disable %systemdrive% -rebootcount 2 means.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• borncity.com

August’s Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 21H2 failed to install with error 0x80073701 for many users. Those who forced it through experienced system freezing and reboot loops. XPS Viewer broke. IE mode tabs became unresponsive in Edge. The update embodied the classic Windows Update dilemma: not installing it leaves you unpatched, but installing it might make your computer unusable. Either way, you lose.

• thewincentral.com

The July preview update broke the Start menu completely. Clicking the Start button did nothing. Pressing the Windows key did nothing. The most prominent UI element in Windows — the one with the operating system’s name on it — simply stopped responding. Microsoft deployed an emergency server-side fix within 24 hours, which is unusually fast for them, perhaps because “the Start button doesn’t work” is the one bug even a Microsoft executive would notice during their morning coffee.

• www.windowslatest.com

July’s Patch Tuesday broke the Start menu — again. It also crashed .NET Framework 3.5 applications, which includes a surprisingly large number of business applications. Boot loops hit some users. XPS Viewer broke. IE mode tabs died. The Start menu breakage would persist through the preview update KB5015882 that followed, making July 2022 the month where Microsoft spent three weeks unable to make the Start button work. PCGamer’s coverage was simply titled “Windows 11 security patch problems,” which at that point was barely even news anymore.

• www.windowslatest.com
• www.pcgamer.com

June 2022’s update went after multiple targets at once. Wi-Fi hotspot stopped working — connecting a client device would kill the host’s internet connection entirely. Hyper-V on Windows 11 threw snap-in errors and refused to launch. Azure AD sign-in broke on ARM devices. And on the server side, KB5014692 destroyed RDP, RRAS, and VPN connectivity — servers would work for about five minutes after boot before losing all network connectivity. Remote administrators couldn’t remote in to fix the remote access that was broken. Beautiful.

• pureinfotech.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The May preview update continued the .NET Framework 3.5 application massacre — apps that depended on the framework simply refused to open. Trend Micro antivirus scans failed, leaving users who paid for third-party security software unprotected. SteelSeries GG, the gaming peripheral software, broke. Installation failures were common. Microsoft had been shipping .NET 3.5-breaking updates for months by this point, apparently unable to test against a framework they built and shipped with the operating system.

• www.windowslatest.com

May’s mandatory security update silently disabled .NET 3.5 Framework, causing a cascade of application launch failures with error 0xc0000135. ProtonVPN, PowerShell, Event Viewer, KeePass, Visual Studio, Discord, ShareX, and Teams all refused to open. As a delightful bonus, machines running Sophos Home antivirus got BSODs from the hmpalert.sys driver. A security update that breaks your VPN, your password manager, your IDE, your chat app, AND your antivirus — that’s efficiency.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

The April preview update broke .NET Framework 3.5 applications — a theme that would repeat for months to come. Safe Mode, the diagnostic mode you boot into when Windows is broken, developed display flickering and explorer.exe instability. So when the update broke your apps, and you tried to boot into Safe Mode to fix it, Safe Mode was also broken. Some users encountered BSODs during installation. Microsoft had managed to break both the normal operating mode and the emergency diagnostic mode in the same update.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com

April’s Patch Tuesday made browsers crash or lose internet access with error 0xc0000022. System-wide stuttering affected mouse movement, UI animations, and video playback — the entire computer felt like it was running through molasses. Wi-Fi connections dropped. The taskbar misbehaved. Installation failed for many users. In an era where computing happens primarily in a web browser, shipping an update that crashes browsers is roughly equivalent to bricking the computer for most users’ purposes.

• thewincentral.com

January 2022’s Patch Tuesday was a double whammy. While KB5009557 was boot-looping domain controllers (see that entry), KB5009543 was simultaneously killing L2TP VPN connections across Windows 10 and 11. Every L2TP/IPsec connection attempt failed with “the security layer encountered a processing error.” Cisco Meraki, SonicWall, Ubiquiti, and WatchGuard VPN appliances were all affected. Remote workers got to explain to their bosses why they couldn’t connect to the corporate network. Microsoft needed a week to ship emergency fixes.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com
• www.bleepingcomputer.com

December’s Patch Tuesday silently killed cloud service startup apps. OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and other cloud sync applications stopped auto-starting and disappeared from the Settings startup list entirely. Users didn’t notice until their files stopped syncing, potentially losing work. Windows Search broke. CPU usage spiked. Installation failed for many. The cloud sync issue was particularly insidious because it was silent — no error messages, no notifications, just your files quietly not syncing to the cloud while you assumed everything was fine.

• learn.microsoft.com

The very first cumulative update for Windows 11 broke network printing. Shared printers failed with errors 0x000006e4, 0x0000007c, and 0x00000709 — an impressive trio of error codes for what should be a basic network operation. This was part of the ongoing PrintNightmare saga, where Microsoft’s attempts to patch a print spooler vulnerability kept breaking printing itself. The fix arrived nine days later with KB5006746. Windows 11 was barely a week old when its first update proved that the tradition of Patch Tuesday breaking things would continue uninterrupted on the new operating system.

• www.bleepingcomputer.com