Windows 11 update sends some desktops into an unwanted goth phase Microsoft's August update preview has painted some Windows 11 desktops black – and affected users can't simply restore their preferred backgrounds. Microsoft has confirmed reports that the update can prevent personalization settings from loading on Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. In an unfortunate Rolling Stones tribute, the operating …
A simple one-liner ...
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Microsoft breaks [fill in] with [fill in] update
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... with a suitable coda at the end ...
As for that fix, Microsoft wrote: "We are working on releasing a resolution for this issue in a future Windows update."
... would have sufficed.
Maybe stressing the presence of key words in MS' statement: resolution, future and update, noting that no mention was made of it not breaking something else.
.
For decades I've set solid black backgrounds on the Windows desktop (and the taskbar at the top of the primary monitor so that start menus can drop down as they ought to - a hangover from using a Mac for a year or so). Plain black was initially to save the graphics card doing unnecessary work, nowadays it's just what I'm used to and is distraction free.
Never felt the need to have a busy (possibly auto changing) background that made it harder to see the few icons I have there, I'm sure others work in different ways that suit them.
I did once try wide astronomy images that spanned multiple monitors and also different images and colors on different virtual desktops, but reverted back after a few days.
Unfortunately Microsoft mucking this up is not as astonishing as it should be.
Oh, we only have that as logon screen. The newest propaganda for main work laptop, the newest less annoying propaganda for the second laptop for a customer. The third one has a practically neutral logon picture, which includes actually useful information things like the hotline number.
Nor is the one I just got from my employer...I had to uninstall a couple of Xbox apps...so definitely not the Enterprise version.
Am I the only user who wants the Daylight theme? Not a fan of black backgrounds.
The HP bloatware is still there, I'm a bit nervous about blowing that away, lest it somehow muck up Win11...
@AC
I go the astronomy image background route - though it's automated and uses NASA "astronomy photo of the day" API to update the background daily (except when the "photo" of the day is a video, I only set it as background when it is a photo, on days when it is a video it falls back to randomly grabbing one of my photos from Flickr using Flickr API)
.. Rolled my own software to do this ages ago, but it is really trivial to do (probably very simple now with "AI" as its the sort of small self contained and well defined task "AI" might actually cope with),
My first encounter with carousel desktop wallpaper display programs was whilst working on a busy IT helpdesk in the late 90s dealing with corporate customers.
This was in the period when the first P400 Windows PCs started appearing and our helpdesk was slowly replacing the older Pentium based machines with the much faster P400s.
As we were hot desking which PC you ended up with depended on when you started your shift. So on the fateful morning I rolled up for my late morning to early evening shift to find that the only PC available was the oldest P90 which, while usable was the slowest machine that our team had.
I logged in and started working. The day was busy and one of my first customers was a (justifiably) irate gentleman who, although their problem was easy to fix and covered by the terms of their support contract was still waiting for a fix some days later.
As I was attempting to take notes, work out what to do next and placate the customer the P90 froze for fifteen seconds. Five minutes later whilst trying to finish the call it did exactly the same thing.
Somewhat later in the day when things had quietened down a bit I discovered the culprit. It was a natty utility that replaced the desktop wallpaper image every five minutes. I found out that it had been installed by a collegue during a quiet night shift and then the aforementioned collegue had found some "cool" images on the internet and downloaded them. Without checking the actual file sizes.
Most of them were large enough to make a P90 running Win 95 go into single tasking mode whilst loading them. I wrote a stroppy email to our team leader who, after berating me for the tone of my email proceeded to send out an email later that day to the whole team reminding us all that installing "non work related software" on helpdesk PCs was not permitted
You remind me of my days on the 1st line IT Helpdesk back in the late 90s. And as most of us will know 1st line is always the most hectic/frantic as you have to fend off phone calls, emails and internal punters coming up to your desk asking/demanding help because "I have a very important meeting in 5 minutes etc"
I was hot desking and I ended up with an iffy Windows 98 Compaq box that could barely handle a couple of sessions simultaneously without bombing out. 20 minutes into using it it crashed with the goold old "out of memory" error and took an age to correct itself. And all the time the phones are still ringing and sales managers are still hanging around waiting for help.
Turns out some other helpdesk guy had created a small batch file that cycled his favourite football players on a wallpaper loop. But he didn't factor in he was using large bitmaps that the Compaq just couldn't deal with while doing other - proper - tasks, and down it went!
Most embarrassing and needless to say group admin controls were put in place on 1st line and 2nd line boxes, which made our job even more difficult, all thanks to a knob jockey too busy browsing the web for his latest football team
Well now, continuing the theme - Men at Arms, 1993:
"...And give me some more coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night.”
Harga looked surprised. That wasn’t like Vimes. “How black’s that, then?” he said.
“Oh, pretty damn black, I should think.”
“Not necessarily.”
“What?”
“You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night.”
Vimes sighed. “An overcast moonless night?” he said.
Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot. “Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?”
“I’m sorry? What did you say?”
“You gets city lights reflected off cumulus, because it’s low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in—”
“A moonless night,” said Vimes, in a hollow voice, “that is as black as that coffee.”
Exactly this.
What could they possibly have been changing that broke the desktop background?
It feels like Windows is in total free-fall at the moment where everyone working on it doesn't really know what anything does and are just fiddling with a codebase that no one understands and is too big to learn.
“What could they possibly have been changing”
Your desktop takes up a lot of screen space.
Space they could use to show you ads.
Maybe some experimental, not quite finished code was accidentality shipped in the update.
Might be some relic of the licencing system that left nonactivated copies without background choices is misbehaving.
Lot’s of mights, my money is on the ad space.
Debian stable has always been more stable than pretty much every other operating system ...
Indeed ...
Then came Poettering's [systemd] and now there is their take on [AI].
That is what I was referring to.
See
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/30/debian-votes-to-let-contributors-code-with-ai/5293421
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/08/msg00005.html.
Windows used to do the black backround, disable peronalization, etc. when you'd pirated, didn't bother to crack, and didn'tr activate Windows 'in time'. So don't worry, that copy of Windows you paid for (force bundled with your PC usually), you're now getting the same as those who paid $0 for it.
And that means...Win11! Yay!
So, after spending a couple of HOURS getting it set up and all the updates loaded, I'm not very impressed.
Oh, well...the pay's good and the work and coworkers are fun, so I'll put up with Windows once again. It'll make returning to my Linux system that much more fun.
This is explicitly why I disagree with the Cyber Essentials 14d blanket "every update installed" demand. 7d past release date I'll take the critical stuff, ~14d is when I'll consider anything non-super-hyper-critical. It's not that the patches aren't important, but on balance if I patched my entire estate on launch-day, or at least started it, I'd end up with this clownshow to deal with monthly.
Sometimes I wonder if security boffins would rather my PCs/servers were suspended each in a 3m2 steel box which was subsequently filled with concrete, then lobbed in the Mariana Trench under surveillance. It'd certainly be more secure then.
Well, the black desktop background and the botched mouse pointer are occurring on non English Windows 11 systems. Some German blog reader has figured out, what went wrong within the code base (spoiler: they translated registry keys where some settings are stored and read - and that went wrong). My take: While we have had such opsies in the past, we will see it more and more, due to vibe coding and AI slop used at Microsoft-
https://borncity.com/win/2026/09/04/are-vibe-coding-and-ai-slop-the-cause-of-windows-11-issues-desktop-background-mouse-pointer-etc/
Oh, so they applied their AI-translated support article! That explains the weird new regkeys...
HKEY_Diese_Maschine\Weichware\Winzigweich\Fenster\Aktuelle Version\Steuerungseinheit\Glaseinfärbungen\Stoffmuster
HKEY_Aktueller_Benutzer\Steuerungseinheit\Schreibtisch\Tapete
Sadly I've seen several AI-translated support articles like that... Lately not, but way way too many, so the above is meant to be a joke, but I am not so sure whether they might actually appear some day...
It feels like every Windows update is self-destructing lately. Not only are they hopelessly behind in the initiative to provide Windows with a consistent interface, the bugs seem to be flying non-stop. At this point why not just do a new NT style rewrite because the current code base is obviously the problem here.
It used to be that being an "early adopter" of sorts to install security and SW patches was a good thing: latest drivers, OS/performance upgrades, SW patches, and of course security updates. Nowadays you risk more from operational downtime than you do from CVE/KEV exploits if you patch too soon (you'll be fine, provided you're doing at least *some* defense-in-depth).
I guess it's been at least two years ago since I toggled "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" to the OFF position. Too many bork events have conditioned my security posture. TBF, I still look at which updates are available when they're available - and I'll manually apply an updated if it's important, but that little yellow-orange dot at the bottom-right of my screen indicating that "I'm at risk!!!!" (pearl-clutching, indeed) stays on for about as long as it can before I take any action.
Thank you again, MS. Once my current PC has gotten longer in the tooth, I will be migrating to some Linux flavor. This is just one of many reasons I'm choosing to migrate, most of which have been made within the last two years due to increased frustration, intrusion, and frankly bonkers-level changes made to the core OS and UI.
Think of it:
- no more CoPilot
- no more OneDrive
- no more Clippy-esque overly helpful whizzbang widgets
- no more advertising intrusion
- no more telemetry concerns
- no more monthly subscription-based nonsense
- no more bloat
- and plenty of other reasons.
Icon --> It's Friday and MS has driven me to drink.
I applaud M$'s persistence & continued futile update efforts. I stopped with Windows 7. Zorin OS now. My computer does what I ask & what I want. Happy camper. Enjoying watching the FIBA Cup Games on my laptop that M$ will never screw up again. Enjoying life & missing out on nothing digital.
Windows XP drove me to Linux. That was when Windows' driver support started to decline, when the OS would create multiple "Documents and Settings" folders on a standalone PC with only one user account, and the OS was really bogged down.
Use what works for you, even if it's Windows, but I won't even consider it now. I had to install on several work computers last year, and the install kept asking for permission to collect user data. The user is now the product.
