It's a patch bonanza as Microsoft showers its OS platforms with update love Microsoft issued a whole bunch of updates last night, including one to deal with an alarming bug in Windows Server 2016. Tucked innocuously among a swathe of fixes ranging from dealing with Russian time zone changes to fixing wobbly Hyper-V servers is the text: "Addresses an issue in File Explorer that sometimes deletes the …
I got the update and ended up with a black desktop with the error:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Desktop is unavailable and a desktop screen where explorer is borked and you cant use the start menu.
From Googling it appears that rolling back to the previous Windows version is the only fix so that is around half a day of my time wasted on the POS operating system.
I had that half a dozen updates ago (TBH, it might even have been Windows 7, I mean ....), I created the C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Desktop folder in question, waited a few seconds, then HARD reboot, and all was good ... memory vanes, but I think I could access task manager (taskmgr.exe) and from there get to elevated cmd.exe to create it ... then again ... if they re-implemented this "feature" it might actually be by design ... nobody knows ... these cheeky buggars, making our life harder after each update. I am tempted to switch to Linux, but there is not fun in that, <sarcasm>"it just works!"</sarcasm>
I fixed it by grabbing the Update Assistant from the Windows site on another machine, copying to a USB stick, transfer the program to the C:\ drive and running from there in a command prompt (might have been an elevated prompt) called from Task Manager. It was a week or so ago, so there might have been a couple of extra steps, but that solved the issue on a machine here. Hope it helps.
Even back in 198x, we learned that *software* testing, as opposed to hardware testing was fraught with complexity. Starting with the impossibility of being able to produce the full spread of possible conditions that might occur in even the simplest set of code.
So it's hardly surprising that come 2018, the complexity involved has increased exponentially - which is quite a staggering thought. Call it the revenge of Moores Law.
What is surprising is that given we all know this, MS insist on making each iteration of Windows *more* complex and interconnected, rather than a *less* complex mesh of smaller modules.
The problem is, given this trajectory, it's entirely possible - probably even - that we will never see a stable version of Windows again. Which I think is big enough news.
Stability for an OS, doesn't equate to revenue as it once did. Issues ensure that you remain paranoid enough to stay on contract.
Windows 10 is now just a software casino game, with the product ensured to be as stable as the satisfaction with the latest earnings report.
Windows users tend to have a very strong case of Stockholm syndrome.
That and Windows has been around and dominant so long that the average person doesn't know any better. Most haven't a clue how fix or even make minor changes to improve things. They don't know about sites like this where prudent people will sit back after an update is released and what breaks or test it themselves. I think the term "Sheeple" is how MS views it's users/customers.
[They don't know about sites like this where prudent people will sit back after an update is released and what breaks or test it themselves.]
What, you think techie muggles should asking for help here? They'll get 105 downvotes and about 30 sarcastic remarks before someone posts a link to a fix or simply says, you shouldn't have done that ... Dave...
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"...to be told initially that the behaviour was by design..."
I HATE when MS pulls this crap. They did exactly the same thing with the Windows Explorer "folder jumping" bug in Windows 7 (expand a folder in Explorer and it scrolls the view up so you can't see the contents of the folder you've just expanded - a bug that can be fixed with Classic Shell thankfully). It's not an excuse to say that a bug is "by design" just so you don't have to get off your arses and fix it.
Thankfully in this case, common sense has prevailed, however MS needs to be a lot more careful about using the "by design" excuse to avoid having to fix annoying (or sometimes dangerous) bugs.
and you get a lot of other problems, last month wsl failed to start, new version of hyper-v making all my vms unbootable, had to upgrade them to v9, but then you cant go back. bluetooth driver suddenly failing. I rather put my precious stuff in containers running on debian or ubuntu.
I have seen that in older versions of Windows, but is comparatively recent feature as far as I recall - it would seem to have been introduced, from what I have seen, in the last two to three years or so.
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