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Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Investigating Windows Start Menu and Taskbar Shortcuts Disappearing (theverge.com) 36

Posted by msmash from the stranger-things dept.
Microsoft says it's investigating an issue in Windows that is causing application shortcuts in the Start menu or taskbar to disappear. From a report: Multiple IT admins have detailed the problem on Twitter and Reddit this morning, and it appears to be related to a recent update to the Microsoft Defender threat detections. The problem is affecting businesses and organizations using Microsoft 365 and Defender for protection against malware, viruses, and other threats. In a note to customers, Microsoft says it has received reports that a certain attack surface reduction (ASR) rule is causing the problems. IT admins are currently trying to work around the issue by setting the "Block Win32 API calls from Office macro" rule to audit only. Microsoft says it has now "reverted the rule to prevent further impact whilst we investigate further." The software maker hasn't issued a workaround or any guidance on how IT admins might recover the shortcuts on affected machines.
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Microsoft Investigating Windows Start Menu and Taskbar Shortcuts Disappearing More

Microsoft Investigating Windows Start Menu and Taskbar Shortcuts Disappearing

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  • heh (Score:2, Informative)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

    The software maker hasn't issued a workaround or any guidance on how IT admins might recover the shortcuts on affected machines.

    If Defender snapped them up then they ought to be in quarantine. You can restore quarantined files from the command line [superuser.com], so it should be scriptable (although given the ragged, poorly pretty-printed output from most Windows CLI tools, it will probably be painful.)

  • Crapware, nothing else (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @09:19AM (#63205552)

    MS must be the most incompetent and dysfunctional tech company to ever ever stay relevant long-term. How to do reliable, configurable and highly usable desktop environments was solved about 30 years ago. And yet, MS still has not managed to do so.

    • Re:Crapware, nothing else (Score:4, Funny)

      by Nartie ( 1128613 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @09:29AM (#63205580)
      To be fair, deleting random stuff will reduce your attack surface.

    • MS must be the most incompetent and dysfunctional tech company to ever ever stay relevant long-term. How to do reliable, configurable and highly usable desktop environments was solved about 30 years ago. And yet, MS still has not managed to do so.

      Truely doesn't surprise me. For the last few months, I've been feeling that copy / paste (specifically copy) isn't 100% reliable. I've been figuring that it's just a "me" issue; that I'm imagining it. Then a co-worker complained about exactly the same thing.

      Maybe it's time to go back to Windows 7. With the end of updates this week, it means Microsoft won't be fiddling with it any more.

      • Maybe it's time to go back to Windows 7. With the end of updates this week, it means Microsoft won't be fiddling with it any more.

        Might as well go to 8. Classic Menu makes it usable, and Embedded will still get updates until July. It has some substantial performance improvements.

        I am still using 7 in VMs, but Linux on the metal. I am no longer booting into Windows ever...

      • For the last few months, I've been feeling that copy / paste (specifically copy) isn't 100% reliable

        THANK YOU! I thought it was just me bitching how when I "copied" something it wasn't being done.

        This goes along with mouse clicks not always working for some time under 10. I know for a fact I'm clicking the window or file or whatever, and Windows does not change its focus accordingly.

        • This goes along with mouse clicks not always working for some time under 10. I know for a fact I'm clicking the window or file or whatever, and Windows does not change its focus accordingly.

          Damn; seen that too. I click a window's titlebar to drag it, and nothing. It's like the window both missed the activation click and the drag.

          Another annoyance with icons is click latency. I go to drag a file somewhere, but the file doesn't select and the mouse just moves. Then I go and select the file again, and instead of dragging it opens, like the click was queued then Windows got around to processing things on the second click. Annoying AF.

          This stuff shouldn't be rocket science, and Microsoft was bette

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by leptons ( 891340 )
            This is what happens when younger developers come in without any context or training from the more experienced developers. I have no doubt that someday, likely many years from now, Windows will be completely unusable. For now I'm sticking with Windows 10, and I may need a reinstall as it's been running for at least 5 years and the amount of developer cruft is building up - too much messing around with too many programs and registry hacks. I love that I can hack the registry, but it can definitely lead to so

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by gweihir ( 88907 )

              This is what happens when younger developers come in without any context or training from the more experienced developers. I have no doubt that someday, likely many years from now, Windows will be completely unusable.

              Looks like it. Regarding GUIs, MS has gone downhill for quite some time now and there really is no explanation left besides a really bad development and design culture.

      • Yes, bring Windows 7 back. I mean that. Reset this shit that Nadella is responsible for. What amazes me is the support Windows 7 still receives. My mother-in-law just bought a new Canon printer and asked me to come over and set it up. She still runs Windows 7 per my advice. I thought to myself, "Great, it probably doesn't support Windows 7, she should have checked with me first." Lo-and-behold it supports Windows versions 7.1 SP1 and above. 14 years after the introduction of Windows 7 manufacturers are stil

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          I just decommissioned my last Win7 box. Beides the now missing security-support, there was really nothing wrong with it and in some ways it was better than Win10.

        • You are better off putting your mother-in-law on a recent Linux distro.
          I assume she will not use windows-only software and at least then bugs are being fixed.
          • She's a home health care aide and the documents the State needs uploaded have to be in M$ format, otherwise she would have been on Mint years ago. Importing and exporting the documents in LibreOffice messes with some of the formatting as well unfortunately.

      • Wait. If by "copy isn't 100% reliable," do you mean when you "press Ctrl + C, what you are pretty certain that you had selected didn't get copied to the clipboard so you go back, copy again, and it works the second time?"

        If so, I have the same problem. It's intermittent but drives me up a wall when it happens. I end up pasting whatever I previously had on my clipboard. I've dumped so much garbage, including sensitive material on a couple of occasions, into Google search due to this bug.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by ch_rob ( 655367 )
          I had this and then turned off the clipboard sharing in "Phone Link" - haven't seen the issue since.

  • Feature Creep (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @09:47AM (#63205648)

    Maybe because, instead of a place to launch your applications, the start menu is now a place to show ads and weather and news updates and search results and recently viewed applications and documents and recommendations curated by some unknown algorithm.

    All I use it for is to launch applications, so if it can't do that reliably there is a *huge* problem from my perspective.

    • Opening the Start Menu shouldn't eat up 25% of your CPU.

  • It's a conspiracy, man! (Score:3)

    by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:18AM (#63205848) Homepage

    Icons are secretly disappearing with no explanation. That can't be an accident. I say it's caused by radiation from those 5G cell towers. Now that 5G has successfully infiltrated your system, they will begin to sweep up all your data, and the Feds will soon be crashing through your front door. If you liver near a 5G tower, get away from there NOW!

  • This problem has occurred repeatedly through the history of Windows. So much so that I had decided it was a feature of Windows rather than a bug. b/c of that, I believe Microsoft should leave it in, so that we know a true valid version of Windows when we see it (and don't see the Start Menu and Taskbar Shortcuts).
  • If Windows 10 was security patched as long as Windows 11, I would have never switched. Other than round corners, there was no other redeeming feature.
  • I dare Microsoft to give people a choice between Windows 11 or Windows 10--with the same end of life.

  • I got lucky, but it's a disaster! (Score:3)

    by foxalopex ( 522681 ) on Friday January 13, 2023 @12:53PM (#63206158)

    This problem affected my company, fortunately, I don't have too many staff (about 20). Apparently somehow defender is detecting both Start Menu links and Quick Links as a virus and disabling or deleting them. The quick fix to stop it from spreading is to shutdown the "Block Win32 API calls from office maco" features in endpoint protection. It doesn't fix any links that it screwed up thou. Considering most staff don't know how to go directly to executable to launch it, I feel bad for anyone who's in the thousands of staff. It knocked out Chrome, Edge, Outlook and the entire Office Suite... Well good luck to anyone dealing with this!

  • Sorry, but this is the worst idea I've ever heard. Take this away and I'll definitely move to linux.
  • At our place it removed a required ruby gem file from some Vagrant directory. That was a nice head scratcher for the people still using Vagrant.

  • Description is crap; the taskbar going blank / not responding to clicks or keystrokes has been a pervasive issue ever since Windows 11 was released. I hit the issue on every single Windows 11 installation I use, even the aarch64 vm I run on my macbook.

    Windows 11 explorer idiosyncrasies are a large part of why I have not yet elected to deploy Win 11 to anyone in our org that doesn't need it (WSL2/WDDM3 and the Kernel are improved on win11, everything else is a regression)

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