Windows 11's latest updates have arrived - yesterday was Patch Tuesday, of course - and it appears that the painful bugs which were present in last month's preview of the cumulative update for 23H2 have been stamped out in the full release.
However, the update for Windows 11 24H2 doesn't look to have been so smooth for some folks thus far, and while there aren't quite such showstopping bugs, there are some annoyances for sure - and some oddness, too.
First of all, the good news on Windows 11 23H2, with the new update fixing the mentioned major problems with Blue Screens of Death (and Green Screens, too) and multiple forced reboots. There were other bugs too, with wireless peripherals and more.
These were actually addressed for those who installed the preview with a Known Issue Rollback from Microsoft, but fortunately the bugs aren't present at all in the full release of the October update for 23H2 users.
That's good to know, and going by feedback on the new patch, with no one complaining about said issues, everything seems to be back on track.
As noted with the patch for Windows 11 24H2, however, that appears to have come at least somewhat off the rails.
Installation fails, sluggishness, and stolen drive space
On the Reddit thread which introduces the patches, we can see reports from Windows 11 24H2 users that the latest update fails to install. (A recurring problem with Windows 11, it must be noted).
Furthermore, there are complaints of very sluggish behavior in some parts of the interface, such as Alt-Tabbing causing a delay of a few seconds (and a black screen) while cycling through open apps. Elsewhere there are other complaints about the time taken to sign out of the lock screen being similarly lengthy (with more than a few seconds of delay).
Finally, there's an odd problem with Windows 11 24H2 whereby post-installation, Disk Cleanup sees the update files are present - 8.63GB of them - and offers to remove them, but then fails to erase these files. In other words, users are losing a small chunk of their drive.
Maybe that's not much of a worry for those with a decent sized drive (or two), but those with a smaller single SSD might be a bit miffed at the loss of a chunk of storage space that they could well do without. Hopefully this rather strange state of affairs won't persist, and a fix will be on Microsoft's radar.
Version 24H2 is still not available to the vast majority of Windows 11 users, as it's a phased and tightly controlled rollout initially, so Microsoft will certainly want to iron out some of these weirder bugs before opening up the floodgates on the upgrade.