Windows 10 update breaks audio for some systems

Another Windows update, another Windows problem. Microsoft has admitted that a July update for Windows 10 may have broken audio for some users.  KB5015878, released on July 26, apparently caused some Windows devices to have no audio, while others reported some audio ports malfunctioning, only some audio devices working, or …

[Snake]

Printers

It's true, my Win10 workstation lost the ability to print *twice* after recent updates. For me the solution was a full rebuild of the printer installations - remove the printers, the ports and the drivers, then a full reinstall. The problem was that some print drivers do not want to uninstall, with an "In use" error, which turned out to be (after a dig-dug through the registry) that some print drivers install x86 and x64 versions of themselves. Removing the printer removed one version of the driver but not the other (usually leaving the x64), thereby causing the deletion hang.

Yes, I know, my decades-long history of hacking the Registry allowed me to fix it and I'll agree, that isn't a solution for all but the hardest-core, and shouldn't be needed in the first place. But, after much detective work, it works.

The problem seems to be old drivers; once everything was updated and synchronized (the various thermal label printers are direct USB-connected) it all works now. But a lot of people will / would / are tearing their hair out over this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Printers

Windows., such a stable OS :-/

I really like the totality of the fix, which is basically... on a per app basis or system wide affliction it might or might not happen and if or when it does you may or may not be able to fix it. So concrete!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Printers

If you get the "In Use" message, try restarting the spooler then deleting the driver as soon as it restarts. You have a small window where it will let you remove it regardless of it being in use. However, you can't delete it while the spooler is not running, so you have to get your timing right!

[Kobus Botes]

Re: Printers

Mmmm. My wife's laptop has had some issues with printing to a Canon Maxify printer for some time (I have previously written about it), but in the last two weeks it seems to have become worse (she does not regularly print to it, so I cannot say for sure, but she used it fairly often the last couple of weeks).

Error messages vary, but is mostly either "The printer is offline" or "The printer is off". Other errors are "The printer is not responding", "The printer did not interpret the command correctly" (or something in that vein), "The printer is busy" or "Cannot print to the printer". In all cases the printer is healthy and can be pinged from the laptop, even though it is supposedly off.

Note: the printer is connected via wi-fi, to my frustration. It does not have (an old-fashioned) RJ-45 port, only a USB port, but then the laptop must be on and connected if you want to print.

The fixes are similarly varied: Restarting the printer (sometimes more than once), rebooting the Laptop, connecting the laptop with a cable to the network (thereby cutting out one wi-fi link), restarting the print spooler, stopping and starting the spooler (waiting a while between stopping and starting (ot seems to make a difference).

Uninstalling the printer driver and reinstalling a freshly downloaded driver has not really made a difference.

I will try and see if any detritus remains in the registry - hopefully that will solve her problem.

[Spazturtle]

Re: Printers

The solution to almost all printer issues is to either use them with a *nix system or plug them into an OpenWRT router (works with USB) and let CUPS do it's magic.

[Snake]

Re: *nix

That isn't a 'solution', "Just plug it into yet another computer, running a different OS, and then get the two disparate systems to talk to one another! It'll fix everything!"

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: *nix

FWIW, I sometime have issues printing to my network Brother laser printer from Windows. Windows just sits there apparently unable to "wake" the printer from it's slumbers. Just manually pressing a button on the printer to "wake" it doesn't solve the problem. Windows has decided the printer is "Not Ready". Only a power cycle of the printer will allow Windows to then see the printer and start sending the queued job(s) to it.

However, just the other day, it happened to wife, also printing from Windows. I tried sending a job from my FreeBSD laptop and the printer sprang into life, printed my job then continued on with her job from Windows.

Clearly "something" weird is happening in Windows, with the Windows Brother printer driver or the printer itself when Windows is the OS sending the job, and yet printing via CUPS from FreeBSD not only never has the issue but does "something magic" that allows Windows printing to start working again on a different computer.

I have no idea what is going on, but the "magic" seems to happen after the correct incantations are invoked.

I've also seen an issue where no amount of fiddling with driver settings, de-installing-re-installing drivers and playing with BIOS setting could get the onboard sound working again. Except when I booted a live Linux distro, the sound worked perfectly fine. Rebooting back into Windows, suddenly the sound was also working fine. My best theory for that one is that something in the Linux audio driver reset some on-board setting in the sound hardware that the Windows driver wasn't dealing with. Maybe the Windows driver made assumptions about "things that could never happen" while the Linux driver, probably being a reverse engineered bit of code, did everything "by the book" when it came to detecting and initialising the hardware.

Sometime, a different approach might be the fix you are looking for. It may not be the long term answer for some people, or even for most people, but if no other fix is forthcoming, it might be time to think outside the box. :-)

[David Hicklin]

Re: *nix

"Brother laser printer from Windows. Windows just sits there apparently unable to "wake" the printer from it's slumbers"

I had the same issue only it also affected windows 7 O/S as well, try as you might windows says "printer offline" when it well and truly is not - it is also very random and the PC usually printed off the documents when it was rebooted and you logged back on....

Solution was the port configuration: it configures the printer name/IP address with something like BRN001BA9AE7621 or WSD-[mass of hex characters] - replacing that with the fixed IPv4 IP address solved it. I also suspect the IPv6 gets involved there as well...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: *nix

I just checked on the Windows PCs and the port name is the IP address of the printer. Probably because of how I installed it rather than using Brother driver discs to do it all for me.

[Snake]

Re: spooler

Tried that approach, as recommended by others on the net, a lot more than several times. Only failures resulted. You can't even try Safe mode, as Win10 disables not only the spooler subsystem but some other features, as well :sigh:

That's when I decided to dig into the Registry myself to see if I could find out what was going on.

[An_Old_Dog]

Spooler Timing Window

This sounds way too much like the sarcastic, broken-tech-repair-advice my mom would give: "You're not holding your mouth right."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Printers

Yup, we had that. One of our guys found that remnants remained in the registry - cleaning that out fixed it.

Read: cleaning it out in ALL deployed systems which had problems. Thanks, Microsoft, as if I didn't have enough work already just keeping up with the &^% flood of updates.

[JDPower666]

Would it not be easier to only report when a Windows update DOESN'T break something?

[Snake]

RE: Win10 updates

Since, say, very late Win7, my Windows installations only began breaking with the discovery / mitigation attempts on PrintNightmare. Before then, breaking something in general with an update was an astonishingly rare occurrence for me, hasn't happened in many years. An update may have required a corresponding update to some affected app which was the reason for the Windows patch in the first place, but otherwise having subsystem failures? Hasn't happened in a long time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: RE: Win10 updates

Yeah it seems post nightmare it's a faulty update per month now, before mostly stable of very niche issues.

Printing via sever is still shit as far as I know so that's fun.

[John Brown (no body)]

"only report when a Windows update DOESN'T break something?"

<sound of crickets> where the monthly Patch Tuesday story is supposed to by in the contents list.

[Paul Crawford]

LOL!

This is making Pulseaudio look like a great design

[Duncan Macdonald]

The Pulseaudio author is now at Microsoft

Having infected Linux with Pulseaudio and systemd, Lennart Poettering has joined Microsoft.

This might explain the recent problems !!!!!

[Howard Sway]

7.7.22 : Systemd supremo Lennart Poettering leaves Red Hat for Microsoft

(For anyone who didn't know - he also developed Pulse Audio, and described it as ""the software that currently breaks your audio"")

[Kobus Botes]

@ Paul Crawford

Naughty, naughty. Thankfully LP has left Red Hat and joined Microsoft, so hopefully the won't fix problems in SystemD will now be fixed/removed.

[An_Old_Dog]

systemd

"... so hopefully the won't fix problems in SystemD will be removed."

FTFY.

[Stratman]

"Microsoft has confirmed the BitLocker update issue, and said it's only affecting Windows 11 users. For now, Microsoft is warning all BitLocker users to disable the service prior to installing the update."

How is Mr. or Mrs. Average User meant to know thing like this?

[Jan K.]

And I thought updates were automated, ie not user selectable?

[Kev99]

mictosoft proves once more it has little to no quality control or product testing. Further, they obviously do NOT believe in "If ain't broke, don't 'fix' it!".

[Anonymous Coward]

They stopped trying to fix my W7 machine, it now seems remarkably stable.

Well for a Windows system.

[Anonymous Coward]

But it is broke, so they HAVE to fix it (badly).

[Graham Dawson]

It's not broken; it's simply functioning in an undocumented manner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Was your headline missing the work "again"

I spend my life teaching remote training classes, it is rare to get through a week without Windows audio breaking on at least one student's system.

Most updates seems to shaft at least some of the clients PC's audio.

[ITS Retired]

There is a fix for broken MS updates.

It's called Linux. Your choice of flavors.

[Auntie Dix]

So Much for the BS of "Agile" and "CI/CD"

The leading purveyor's software and updates therefor are as horribly built and buggy as ever.

[Aseries]

Windos 11 Update related Audio issues.

Windows 11. The audio in my Gigabyte MB desktop developed a problem where headphone audio worked but main speaker did not. I was convinced it was a hardware problem to no avail. After the latest update all is back to normal.

[Down not across]

Microsoft recommends...

Those who haven't yet installed the update can use the KIR or update the device drivers. Microsoft also recommends that anyone using advanced audio applications backs up all their settings before installing KB5015878.

How is that going to work then with the bloody automatic updates that happen when you turn your back?

[Wade Burchette]

This is why I delay updates

I always go into my group policy editor (gpedit.msc) and change it so "quality" updates do not install for 21 days. ("Quality" is what Microsoft calls it, not me.) This setting is a little harder to find in Windows 11, but it is still there. The setting is called 'Select when Quality Updates are received". I figure that 3 weeks is enough time for Microsoft to learn how bad they screwed up.

If you have 10/11 Home, you can always add gpedit.msc with a batch file that needs to be run as an administrator. Just copy the steps below into a batch file; a restart sometimes is, but not always, required:

@echo off

del list.txt

pushd "%~dp0"

dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~3*.mum >List.txt

dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~3*.mum >>List.txt

for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . List.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i"

del list.txt

pause