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Microsoft Fixes Decade-Old Windows Bug That Made 'Update and Shut Down' Restart PCs (windowslatest.com) 44

Posted by msmash from the better-late-than-never dept.
Microsoft has released a patch that fixes a longstanding bug in Windows 11 and Windows 10 where selecting "Update and shut down" would restart the computer instead of powering it off. The issue affected users across both operating systems since Windows 10's initial release. The fix arrived in Windows 11 25H2 Build 26200.7019 and the October 2025 optional update KB5067036.

Microsoft confirmed the patch "addressed underlying issue which can cause 'Update and shutdown' to not actually shut down your PC after updating." The problem likely stemmed from the Windows Servicing Stack failing to carry the power-off command through the required reboot phase. During updates Windows must restart into an offline servicing mode to replace system files. The power-off instruction was either cleared or blocked during this transition.

Microsoft Fixes Decade-Old Windows Bug That Made 'Update and Shut Down' Restart PCs More | Reply

Microsoft Fixes Decade-Old Windows Bug That Made 'Update and Shut Down' Restart PCs

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  • About fucking time (Score:5, Informative)

    by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday November 03, 2025 @09:11AM (#65769568)

    This one annoyed the heck out of me. Every couple of months I'd find my PC on waiting at the login screen in the morning having run all night for no reason what so ever. Ironically this nearly included last night, but on from the bedroom I could see a flash from the study where the monitor turned on and lit up the room.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

      This one annoyed the heck out of me. Every couple of months I'd find my PC on waiting at the login screen in the morning having run all night for no reason what so ever. Ironically this nearly included last night, but on from the bedroom I could see a flash from the study where the monitor turned on and lit up the room.

      Were you disappointed there wasn't a small child sitting in front of a static-filled TV saying "They're heeeeeere"?

    • Why the fuck would you shut down a system overnight? They use so little power these days that any power savings from shutting it down are probably met or exceeded by windows thrashing your CPU and disk during boot up to load up all the obligatory services and microsoft spyware just to get to a usable state.

      • Why the fuck wouldn't you? The systems nowadays boot up in 5 seconds or so thanks to the SSDs.

        • And systemd.
          • With SystemD it will either boot quickly or spend 90 to 180 seconds waiting for a (usually) non-critical service to time out before it attempts to finish booting.
            • One good example is ModemManager. It can't exit until either the modem is on-line or it times out, generally because you either don't have one or it's not connected to anything. Why it doesn't start out by checking to see if you have a modem and if not exit right away I don't know. Personally, one of the first things I do is disable and mask it so it doesn't even try to start because it's been well over a decade since I last needed it and nuking it that way makes a significant change for the better in th

            • Yes if you have a problem with your system targets being so poorly setup such that systemd waits on a non-critical service (despite the singular core feature of systemd being that it does not load services sequentially), then you would have that situation.

              The funny part about what you wrote is that I remember the days of waiting for services to time out to finish booting. But that wasn't systemd that did that, it was sysvinit. Systemd skips over that kind of rubbish. It's literally what it's designed to do.

        • Personally I don't because -

          Using the computer isn't always the last thing I do, when I leave it at night I may come back to the computer, I might not. I don't want to come back just to shut it down.

          It use to be said that turning off HDDs shortened their life span, and there is debate over if that is true or not, but there's no denying that spin-up is a common failure point... so I just got used to not turning computers off (and I still use HDDs for storage).

          I have my computer set to do things durin

      • They do? If you have decent desktop, they still idle at 70-80W, plus all the overhead for peripherals. That adds up, and even your 80 Plus Platinum power supply isn't very efficient at only 10% load.

      • Err what? Are you confusing a tablet with a laptop? My PC's idle power consumption is in the order of 40watts. That's a cool $100/year given my electricity price for shutting it down for ~18h / day I'm asleep or at work.

        Or are you talking about putting the system in standby? Why go to the effort of putting a computer into a sleep state, only for it to start up, still thrashing your SSD/CPU, all the while having the downside of a system that hasn't been rebooted (and we all know how well Windows likes after

  • Translation (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gilmoure ( 18428 ) on Monday November 03, 2025 @09:36AM (#65769612) Journal

    "Uh, Windows is hard, it's overly complicated to both use and admin."

    • You got a +5, insightful for your post, so I'm feeling pretty slow right now. I'd like to know how this:

      "The problem likely stemmed from the Windows Servicing Stack failing to carry the power-off command through the required reboot phase. During updates Windows must restart into an offline servicing mode to replace system files. The power-off instruction was either cleared or blocked during this transition."

      ...translates to this:

      "Uh, Windows is hard, it's overly complicated to both use and admin."

      • You got a +5, insightful for your post, so I'm feeling pretty slow right now. I'd like to know how this:

        "The problem likely stemmed from the Windows Servicing Stack failing to carry the power-off command through the required reboot phase. During updates Windows must restart into an offline servicing mode to replace system files. The power-off instruction was either cleared or blocked during this transition." ...translates to this:

        "Uh, Windows is hard, it's overly complicated to both use and admin."

        Out of curiosity, why Does Windows become unstable when it wants to reboot after an update is downloaded? I've had many times that programs get wonky on me, I try to troubleshoot them, then see that it wants to install and reboot.

        • No, not in my experience. Doubtless there are some edge cases where an application will bug out but generally Windows doesn't update system files until after you hit restart.

          • No, not in my experience. Doubtless there are some edge cases where an application will bug out but generally Windows doesn't update system files until after you hit restart.

            Might be an audio driver issue, I use a lot of them.

            Windows 10 and 11 don't play well with audio. The whackiest one is I had some 20 audio drivers on one system, each with a specific name. Some for transmission, some receiving, and some with IQ parameters.

            The update came along, saw the first driver, then renamed every driver the same name with a number suffix. Software quit working. The software company eventually got it changed so Microsoft couldn't work its magic. It turned out to be a pain to get

    • That's true. Would you say Linux is easier? If so, what distro? I'm interested because my experiences setting up and administering Linux has been anything but easy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

        Been setting up and running Redhat, then RHEL servers since the '90s.

        I pretty much stayed away from Linux desktops until the last 10 years as I liked the Mac gui.

        Fedora is my primary desktop gui setup, with a Nobara linux game system for the wife.

        Keep meaning to check out Rocky linux but not really into spinning cycles just to futz with stuff.

  • How convenient (Score:4, Funny)

    by kmoser ( 1469707 ) on Monday November 03, 2025 @10:05AM (#65769664)
    How convenient that they fixed this after the end of Windows 10 support.

  • They turned Windows into trash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Monday November 03, 2025 @10:22AM (#65769706) Homepage
    I've used Microsoft Windows since 3.0, and have installed it hundreds of systems. What remains is a user-hostile bloated heap of failed marketing initiatives. Microsoft took away the tools to manage generic hardware. They took away system icons, replacing them with wordy sentences. They took the power away from the user, and made it their machine. Are you old enough to even remember--when people actually looked forward to a new Windows release?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

      Are you old enough to even remember--when people actually looked forward to a new Windows release?

      Windows ME was the end of that...

      • Win2000, XP and 7 were ok. I've not moved beyond that. Gone Linux and BSD and for the occasional Windows need I have 7. The only place I've used Win 10/11 is my work laptop where I have no choice but to use that unproductive steaming pile of garbage.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by GoTeam ( 5042081 )

          Win2000, XP and 7 were ok. I've not moved beyond that. Gone Linux and BSD and for the occasional Windows need I have 7. The only place I've used Win 10/11 is my work laptop where I have no choice but to use that unproductive steaming pile of garbage.

          Windows 10 didn't seem too bad. Although that might be because I'm comparing it to 8/8.1 & 11.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Are you old enough to even remember--when people actually looked forward to a new Windows release?

      I remember Win 3.11 but I don't remember anyone ever telling me they were looking forward to a new release of Windows.

      • You should remember. 95 was a bona-fide phenomenon. People queued up to buy it. It was hotly anticipated and it absolutely took the world by storm. It certainly wasn't perfect, but it was a huge leap forward from Windows 3.11.

    • Microsoft purposefully screws up every other Windows release, so that the subsequent release can be hailed as a massive improvement.

      • I think those days are gone. They're never going to roll back from the always-online, Microsoft account required, upsell everywhere, telemetry everywhere, shoving ads onto your menus, AI-infused garbage. We've seen the least user-hostile Windows; it's been and gone and it's all downhill from here.

    • Yep, I was very excited about Windows NT 4.0, and installed a prerelease version. It was great! Well, it was great until they came out with the full release. When I installed the GA release of NT 4, it deleted the file pointers for every file on the hard drive, so all I had was a bunch of directories with file names that had zero contents. There was no recovering from that, I had to format the hard drive and start over.

  • Nah, Windows update is still shit.

    • Which one? You have Windows Update, which updates separately from WinGet, which updates separately from Microsoft Store, which updates separately from Edge, which updates separately from Office, etc.

      There is literally no way to coordinate updates for everything in Windows. I battle with this every day trying desperately to keep our client estate updated and as vulnerability-free as possible. It's a goddamn nightmare.

  • I've noticed this behavior only in the last 6 to 8 months or so. Guess I've been lucky. (Though I still have to use Windows, so I guess that's debatable.)

    • No, just decade. The Update and Shut Down feature was first introduced in 2015, exactly 10 years ago. It hasn't ever worked right.

      Many of us didn't notice it too much because usually just Update and Restart all the time. But there certainly were times over the years that I was surprised to find the machine still running, even though I had told it to shut down.

      • Yep, they've been gaslighting me for years with this. Come back in the morning to see the machine is still on and think "Hmm, I guess I must have clicked Restart by accident". Nope! Just MS doing their usual bang-up job with testing.

  • The biggest bug with Windows is corporate policy. Is there a ticket for that?

  • I would think that this would be an easy bug to fix. It sounds like it is isolate to one place in one file. Is there a technical reason why it took so long to fix? Or did Microsoft just not feel like it? (I do almost all of my work on GNU/Linux so don't know a lot about MS windows.)

  • When will they fix Update and Restart (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Cward ( 10374574 ) on Monday November 03, 2025 @05:12PM (#65771056)
    They still do not have a temporary single-use TPM+key+datetime mechanism for BitLocker to allow for updates to be fully completed in a secure and autonomous manner on systems which normally need a password or PIN input. Worse still, they have not addressed the lack of security for BIOS updates on TPM-equipped systems, they still auto-suspend BitLocker in a manner which allows for data theft. It is possible to know the what the new PCR outputs will be ahead of time, so itâ(TM)s not impossible to implement multiple TPM key slots for BitLocker and avoid leaving a gaping hole in the first place!

  • They probably fixed the part about it ending in a shutdown state. But my question is, after Update and Shut Down, will it actually be fully updated the next time you turn it on? Or will it continue to sit at "100% (still working on a few things)"? And when you log in to Windows, will it still make you jump through a bunch of hoops to say you don't want to switch to Edge and Bing? Probably so.

  • Is this why my computer wouldn't start up this morning?

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