Cloud apps stop auto-starting, Search broken, high CPU

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.