This month’s Windows 11 cumulative update is causing serious issues in some reported cases.
This is KB5035853 for Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2, which rolled out earlier this week and included some useful new features. That includes the ability to use the Snipping Tool to edit photos from your Android smartphone directly on your PC, plus adding support for much faster (80 Gbps) wired connectivity with USB4 v2.0.
However, some Windows 11 users have encountered major problems installing the March update Windows Latest highlighting it, and the site itself experiences a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) after running the update process.
The tech site’s BSoD arrived with the error message ‘Thread Stuck in Device Driver’, which isn’t very helpful, and others have encountered this problem, such as a reader using some Lenovo devices (in a business environment).
Moreover, there is evidence of this nasty crash on the Reddit thread introducing KB5035853. One user tells us: “This update caused Windows to crash on startup. Got a blue screen error. Had to turn back. Just a warning. Did that happen to anyone else?”
Someone says they were also affected (and got into a boot loop, with repeated reboots, before getting to that BSoD).
There are other reports in this thread noting that the update installed but then caused ‘random’ BSoDs.
Moreover, there are also people who complain that Windows 11 runs slowly, that their PC stutters after the update, or even freezes occasionally.
Analysis: Repair with one hand, break with the other?
These are really unpleasant side effects here, and the solution so far seems to be to simply roll back the installation (uninstalling KB5035853 or using System Restore to rewind time to before the update was activated).
There’s mention of a YouTube video on Reddit offering possible solutions, and we’ve looked into it – there’s even a few clips – but we’d take the advice given with a grain of salt. Some people in the YouTube comments have reported seeing success, and others have said the solutions described have failed. But for now, rather than trying what seems like shots in the dark as an attempt at a cure, if it’s bothering you, we’d probably just roll back the update and wait for Microsoft to investigate these issues.
(It’s worth noting that there are also more complaints in the YouTube comments about PCs experiencing severe lag after the update).
Currently, The Microsoft support document for the March cumulative update indicates that there are no known issues.
The irony here is that this March update fixes an issue with the February update for Windows 11, where the installation failed (and got stuck at 96%, complete with an error code and a helpful “something did not go as planned” message). . So the patch that fixes that problem where the previous patch couldn’t be installed also can’t be installed in a different, and in fact worse, way.
Hopefully Microsoft is working on this as we type this. It’s hard to say how widespread the BSoD problem is, but there are certainly enough reports of post-install performance issues to suggest that something went wrong with KB5035853.
