OpenSSH broken on mandatory security update, network instability

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.