Microsoft finally admits almost all major Windows 11 core features are broken

It has been a troublesome week or two for Microsoft, for sure. Earlier today, the company fixed a Microsoft 365 outage that made files unusable; downtimes like this seem to happen on a fairly regular basis.

Meanwhile on the Windows side, it has probably been worse. The tech giant got blamed by Nvidia today as the latest Patch Tuesday is leading to performance issues in games. The GPU maker has released an emergency hotfix driver to resolve the problems.

This comes hot on the heels of the massive backlash that the company's Windows boss recently faced due to the evolution of the operating system into an agentic OS as unveiled earlier this week.

On the positive side though, following all that backlash, Microsoft acknowledged Windows has issues, and as if on cue, the company in a new support article has admitted that there are problems on almost every major Windows 11 core feature. The issues are related to XAML and this impacts all the Shell components like the Start Menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and Windows Settings.

Interestingly, while Microsoft is only acknowledging the issue in November 2025, this has been a problem since the July 2025 Patch Tuesday update (KB5062553), so that is four months. Also since Windows 11 25H2 shares the same codebase as version 24H2, the newest Windows 11 feature update is also impacted.

In the support article Microsoft explains:

"After provisioning a PC with a Windows 11, version 24H2 monthly cumulative update released on or after July 2025 (KB5062553), various apps such as StartMenuExperiencehost, Search, SystemSettings, Taskbar or Explorer might experience difficulties.

This will occur for the following:

• First time user logon after a cumulative update was applied.
• All user logons to a non-persistent OS installation such as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or equivalent as application packages must be installed each logon in such scenarios."

If you are wondering, provisioning essentially is the way admins configure devices as they automatically deploy various settings and policies on a client PC. So while the issue is in office PCs, considering a huge number of enterprise PCs are Windows, this is probably a very big problem.

The company further adds that Windows' XAML component and package updates for MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy, Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe, and MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy, are what have been triggering some of the observed problems.

Speaking of observed problems, Microsoft notes that the following dependent Shell components and related services may fail and report an on-screen error or silently fail to execute, such as the following:

• Explorer.exe crash
• shelhost.exe crash
• StartMenuExperienceHost issues

• System Settings silently fails to launch

• Application crashes when initializing the XAML views
• Explorer running but no taskbar window.
• other XAML island views fail to initialize.
• ImmersiveShell problems

Microsoft says that it is working on a fix but, for now, has provided a couple of workarounds to deal with the issue. First, Microsoft says that restarting the Shell Infrastructure host (SIHost.exe) service will help restore the missing Immersive Shell packages. This can be done with the following commands:

Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode

Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode

Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode

Second, a PowerShell logon script has been shared that essentially blocks Explorer from launching prematurely until the required packages are fully provisioned. The batch script for that is given below:

@echo off
REM Register MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode"

REM Register Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode"

REM Register MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode"

You can find the support article here under KB5072911 on Microsoft's official website.