Clearly their adoption of rushing out AI generated code is working well.
Everytime my windows work computer updates, something breaks. Now my mouse doesn’t work well and I’m so tired of dealing with it. IT has had enough of these stupid tickets for why something doesn’t work and why we need admin permissions to fix it.
I hate Windows as much as the next person, but the title is clickbait. It’s an update bug that affects a small number of users, but the title misleadingly suggests Microsoft deliberately removed this functionality.
It’s genuinely bad, even if entire universe isn’t affected. Shows sloppiness. Headline is too kind for implying this could be “some kind of design upgrade”, instead of FUBAR.
The article title is clickbaity. It doesn’t ‘get rid of’ the start menu and explorer. It just makes the processes completely hang so you can’t open any applications, can’t open the menu and can’t open task manager to see wtf is going on. You also can’t access the shutdown function so you have to manually power off.
This happened to me as I was setting up a Windows 11 / Linux dual boot system yesterday, and the Windows side was behaving as described in the article.
I gave up and just installed Linux alone in the end.
I wonder if win+r works to launch stuff and commands
This is the way.
The right click context menu for me has been unusable in certain circumstances for me for the past year or so. It’s happened on multiple devices, including corporate issued dell and Lenovo machines. The menu options just stop responding to clicking. After getting fed up with this and all the other crap I didn’t ask for, I finally just ripped the bandaid off, ditched dual booting, am now on full single boot Linux mint.
And, it’s so fucking refreshing. I finally feel like the machines I built and own are mine again.
Task Manager is launched by the listener in winlogon if you use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc method though, right? I’m pretty sure you can still launch Task Manager, and from there attempt to relauch Explorer, even if Explorer is borked or not running. You’d just have to know how to do that and that you can.
That’s what I always do when Explorer’s ears inexplicably catch fire and I’m either too lazy or too naively hopeful to reboot.
For anyone following along at home, Windows Explorer is also responsible for displaying the start menu/taskbar. In the example in the article there’s something else funky going on inside Explorer, though, because the taskbar and even the desktop icons are all there, it’s just not rendering correctly. (Explorer is also responsible for showing all of your desktop icons.)
oh it was a bug, i thought they did it on purpose to force people to use their stupid ai crap.
You thought that because the headline is pretty deliberately misleading. Clickbait trash.
Even Microsoft (probably) isn’t that stupid or desperate yet. What seems much more likely to me is that they will keep introducing AI features and more invasive ads gradually and making them opt-in or removable with the intention of making them mandatory later on.
I 100% believe that Microsoft fully understands that a lot of people aren’t happy with most of these changes, but profit must grow and they are elbow-deep in their AI gamble so they must keep pushing just slowly enough to avoid most users and businesses feeling like looking for alternatives is worth the effort. They are treading a fine line and are sometimes pushing too hard, but that in itself can be a solid negotiation tactic to manipulate people into accepting bad deals and my guess is that it’s fully intentional.
I’m honestly starting to not believe these articles. On an up to date version of w11 I never see any of the changes these articles claim are happening. I’m a linux user so I like laughing at windows as much as the next guy but i dont want to be an idiot falling for misinfo.
If you want comedy, look at the apple help fourms. You think linux users reimage alot the only troubleshooting step apple has is to reimage.
the only troubleshooting step apple has is to reimage.
That’s not entirely true. More often than not, the only troubleshooting step the “Apple Certified Professionals” there offer is to buy a new Mac.
And you can trade in your existing one for a couple hundred bucks off a new purchase
Isn’t that a good deal?
Lol, no. A good majority of the time the issue is something simple like a loose or broken ribbon cable that would cost $3 in parts and $50 in labour (if you’re being generous with the time).
This practice of the “Genus” bar people telling a customer that they need a whole board replacement that would cost $2000 and saying it’s cheaper to get a whole new computer is well documented.
I was joking of course. I know about all of Apple’s exploits all too well
Ah, ok. Well, Poe’s law
Never in my life have I needed to reimage any Linux machine, but I have had to reimage many, many, many windows machines and quite a few Apple devices too. I have a long career in IT (and even before that, I’ve been building computers since I was 12), so my sample size consists of thousands of computers going back decades.
I’ve only ever reimaged Linux systems when I felt like distro hopping for fun. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, but I think it’s probably more to do with the fact that Linux tends to be extremely reliable once you have it set up (unless you manage to break it, but even then there are usually multiple ways to fix it without reimaging).
I went from an Ubuntu 16.04 install all the way to 20.04 and they involved multiple hardware upgrades and a completely new system at one point, just swapped out the root/home drive.
Since then I’ve been on EndeavourOS with pretty much the same story.
With Windows 7 and 10 I had to constantly reinstall.
same!… heck work updated my laptop from win10 to 11 and now the “Windows App” won’t run… IT dude gave up trying to fix it and order a swap
This is a laptop used, at most once a week, for regular office bs and it basically self destroyed just through windose updates
Same here (except I’m 35 years into being a tech hobbyist, not a professional), and I’ve never reimaged a Linux install (except to try imaging it and learn how it works). Having been exclusively on Linux for 9 years now (playing with it for over 20 years) and Fedora the last 6, I can confidently say that it’s easier to just keep your important files in a separate drive (home directory in its own drive for example) and just reinstall whatever you want if you end up breaking your OS. Reimaging seems way more convoluted.
Out of interest, which aspect don’t you believe? The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.
This seems like a classic windows update issue. In fairness to Microsoft it is difficult to prevent bugs when there is a huge install base, with a huge range of hardware, with a huge range of users on different mixes of updates and updating at their own. I personally think that’s totally believable.
What’s not clear is perhaps the implied overarching story that W11 is worse for this than other versions of Windows. I can’t answer that about windows updates themselves, but I certainly believe W11 is the worst version of Windows I’ve ever used (and I’ve used every version back to 3.11 as a kid). I have to use W11 at work: the UI is absolutely terrible and unfriendly but far worse it constantly and inexplicably slows down, programs become unresponsive repeatedly and I come across errors constantly.
I work in a big organisation and I don’t even bother to report most errors now - we hop between PCs because of the nature of my Job, and I’ve come up across so many I just can’t be bothered opening more tickets. I’d describe it as a mostly large volume of minor issues and inconveniences that cumulatively, on top of the bad design, that make it a shit experience. But I’ve also had numerous major errors since we moved from W10 to W11 on different PCs - they all have the same hardware and software yet the problems are different on each. I’ve given up reporting the problems and just avoid the PCs, and I think a lot of my colleagues are the same.
My organisation (I work in a large Hospital), is already stretched due to high work volume and low staffing and we now have a constantly little drag from Windows 11 on everything we do. It’s like Microsoft sprinkle a little bit of shit onto every computer, every day, all day. The cumulative effect in just my organisation must be massive - I shudder to think how bad it is across the whole economy.
The article is clear the broken update effects a specific subset of enterprise users, on a specific mix of base versions and cumulative updates.
So you admit the headline is lying, then? The headline doesn’t even try to use weasel words to say “some users”, it just straight-up says that the update removes things, heavily implying both that it’s a global change, and that it’s deliberate.
This seems like a classic windows update issue. In fairness to Microsoft it is difficult to prevent bugs when there is a huge install base, with a huge range of hardware, with a huge range of users on different mixes of updates and updating at their own. I personally think that’s totally believable.
I’m a little bit sceptical here - yes, managing that is complicated. But it also is Microsofts fault - managing and constructing updates that work even with different versions or update paths is possible. I really struggle to see how an update could even kill the start menu or Explorer.
From the article:
The latest kerfuffle will only be seen by Enterprise users running Windows 11 24H2 or 25H2 who have a July 2025 cumulative update installed as well.
Are you running Windows 11 Enterprise?
Yeah and even did the steps listed and no issue. If its happening its a rare bug and as a linux user I dont wang to clown on rare bugs since that is throwing stones in a glass house.
I can feel the UI lag in the picture
It’s a ploy from Microsoft to push Copilot: you have to ask it to open the programs or folders you want. /s
Technicians are baffled how, even with an astounding 90% hallucination rate, this still was more reliable than windows search.
Jesus fucking Christ… Is Microsoft literally vibe-coding everything now? Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all before being released into the wild?
The only solution is to re-image?? This is just flat out fucking awful.
Sorry to all those people who went for the LTSC versions of Windows. How the living fuck does this kind of stuff happen.
It’s less the vibe coding and more: this is what happens when you have the developers do all the QA and fire the actual QA staff.
They’ve been screwing up the Windows updates since Windows 10, vibe coding wasn’t a thing at that point.
Sounds like the development team outsourced the QA work to the customer.
It’s less the developer team that did it and more the shareholders and executive team that has turned the product to complete trash.
It’s so dumb, even with the AI stuff I wouldn’t care that much if it was just a new thing the OS could do if the rest of the thing was actually stable. But they seem to be allergic to doing some actual house cleaning and instead keep bolting things on.
The fact that the explorer can regularly completely freeze up nowadays or flat out crash is actually insane. That should be at the top of the priority list before anything else gets worked on. But instead they decided: let’s add a new keyboard shortcut to open a really laggy copilot chat interface.
The fact that the explorer can regularly completely freeze up nowadays or flat out crash is actually insane.
This was literally the trigger for my very first Linux experience, it’s fucking asinine that something so fundamental to the UX could perform so poorly for such an extended period of time.
I love having to reboot the explorer.exe process in task manager because my taskbar search stops working.
*One of two different copilot interfaces. Either the personal copilot or m365 copilot chat…
I remember hearing about this shift of theirs way back in the early Windows 10 days and thinking, “That sounds like suicidal stupidity but maybe there’s something I don’t know?”
Nope. It’s exactly as I thought.
In a way they are. Their QA was sent overseas and at some point was cut down to basically skeleton crew.
Every engineer at MSFT was recently ordered to use AI.
The bulk of where MSFT makes money is not from its OS but from selling your data and being a cloud provider. They don’t really care about the user experience anymore and that has very clearly shown to be their lowest priority for a few years on now.
A lot of what the other comments have said is right, but also add that to on top of all the layoffs theyve had and they keep telling their devs to double their efforts. Its been in so many meetings that at this point a single engineer should be able to do the work of the whole company…
the shareholders keep demanding doubling pace from their engineers but they just wont listen smh
They should just fire all the engineers already theyre clearly slacking off /s
Add on top of it that they’re forcing engineers to use AI to try and magically bridge this gap and you get a lot of slop like this.
It’s a combination of vibe coding and absolutely no QA testing, because they fired a fuck ton of QA people 10 years ago. Microsoft is making it’s users beta test their fucking software through telemetry bug reporting. And we fucking pay for that privilege.
Do these updates not go through any rigorous testing at all
Lol no, MSFT infamously dropped their entire Hardware QA team after WIndows 7 and instead relied on the also infamous insider hub to get QA “feedback” from home users instead, leading to the also infamous Windows 8 disaster and slightly less infamous critical CVEs that went unaddressed because MSFT ddidn’t even bother to read the insider hub posts.
Oh and they didn’t learn anything and kept running with the insider hub well into Windows 10 & 11.
It could get rid of whole system and world would be a nicer place 😎
At the moment the only fix is likely a reimage, unless you can get to the registry to make some edits or deploy a Powershell script to delay the launch of Explorer.exe until the system is ready for it.
How has Satya Nadella not been fired for this dumpster fire of a rollout?
Because everyone left at the company is as bad as he is or worse?
They do still have John Savill and Mark Russinovich but they are both focused on Azure. They really need someone like them on the Windows side.
You mean this Azure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Azure#Controversies
How is this not as bad or worse?
Because line go up
probably saved some cash there from replacing human coders with an llm, by the looks of it.
At this point Win 11 has waaaaay surpassed Vista as the worst windows ever.
Surely ME was worse than Vista?
WinME was just Win98 with a paint job. And as Win98 was, it was pretty decent.
(WinXP was my personal favourite)
I had WINME as my first hand me down. It wasn’t that bad. Vista straight up constantly crashes, BT did not work, audio issues. It was a mess
That’s the thing. My experience was the opposite. ME a crashy mess. I upgraded my computer to Vista about 2 weeks after launch, and it always worked well for me.
Were you not around for Windows ME? I’d take Vista any day over that hot streaming pile of regret.
I remember the joke that Microsoft called it that deliberately so that if people wrote “I hate ME” it wouldn’t sound like they were trashing the OS.
We’re running the oldest supported Windows version in our enterprise just to make sure these non-stop stream of Microsoft fuck-ups doesn’t affect us too much.
oldest supported
So, Windows 11 then, right?
Enterprises outside of Europe can get another year of Windows 10 if they pay for it.
Yes, 23H2 at the moment.
Edit: Enterprise edition, to be clear. Home and Pro 23H2 were eol a couple of weeks ago.
So it’s a botched update not a designed feature.
It’s Microsoft, same thing.
Classic Shell could have a comeback
