The Latest Windows 11 Update Gets Rid of the Start Menu and Explorer

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.

Because line go up

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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.

It is pretty bad. It’s specifically Enterprise that is effected, and if they’re pushing these kinds of bugs on Enterprise customers then they really don’t have the QA they need. Think about how much they care about what they push on standard customers.

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.

This is the way.

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.)

I wonder if win+r works to launch stuff and commands

Because they fired the QA department years ago, in favour of non-rigorous testing by users crazy enough to run whatever Microsoft’s version of a nightly build is. Because there’s no testing plan, some sets of conditions never do get tested.

Looking at all the new features and how none of them have appealed to me with it being different attempts at forcing copilot I think the only happy Windows users are ltsc ones. Closest experience to a dumb OS that doesn’t change and just installs and runs the programs you install and came with minimal bloatware compared to new regular Windows.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

oldest supported

So, Windows 11 then, right?

Technicians are baffled how, even with an astounding 90% hallucination rate, this still was more reliable than windows search.

Per the Microsoft KB for it, this only happens if Windows updates are installed before a user logs in for the first time. So basically re-images and especially VDI environments are at risk of this happening.

Just think about what’s happening behind the scenes on Azure. I work with it daily and even it feels like a bloated slow mess.

Iirc, you can with Pro, but not with home.

They’re still allowing you to hold back updates? So nice of them.