Black screens still plague Windows 10 Azure Virtual Desktop users

Even though Windows 10 has less than a year of support remaining, Microsoft has once again demonstrated its ability to break things with a seemingly innocuous update.

In this instance, Microsoft has admitted that there are still problems for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) users after the installation of July's non-security preview update (KB5040525).

The issue manifests as a black screen following a login to AVD that can last between 10 and 30 minutes. Additionally, single sign-on (SSO) for Office applications such as Outlook and Teams might have problems, while other apps in the suite might lose connectivity.

According to Microsoft, "This issue is caused by a deadlock in the interactions between the Azure Active Directory (AAD) broker and the underlying AppX deployment service (AppxSvc) and Background tasks infrastructure service."

If you're using FSLogix user profile containers on multi-session environments, you're more likely to experience the problem, according to Microsoft's note. Redmond snapped up FSLogix in 2018 and put it to work speeding up Office 365 in virtual environments shortly after.

Spending half an hour staring at a black screen while a deadlock is unpicked is unlikely to be what Microsoft had in mind for users when it used the words "speed up."

Microsoft insisted that the issue was different from the scenario found earlier in October, where AppxSvc was in "an invalid state," resulting in ... a black screen. According to the Windows vendor, that problem was fixed in the October 22 preview update.

Not wishing to be left out, Windows 11 24H2 continues encountering issues at Microsoft's hands. After mitigating some of the problems that caused the Disk Cleanup tool to report free space estimates inaccurately, the tech giant admitted that Task Manager, or at least some of its reporting functions, was not behaving as expected.

After installing the October 2024 non-security preview update, users found that Task Manager reported the number of Apps, Background Processes, and Windows Processes as zero despite having active applications running. Microsoft says, "This issue appears specifically on the Processes page when the 'Group by Type' view is enabled."

Although the original Task Manager has long been facelifted and the code updated, we asked its author from the days of Windows NT 4.0, Dave Plummer, if he had any insights into the problem.

Plummer said, "I don't recall my original task manager breaking down the count by type ... so I imagine that's new code that was added at some point along the way."

"It seems a fairly severe bug," he went on, "but I can see how people might not have noticed it in test, as how often do you look at that count?"

As far as Microsoft's quality assurance team is concerned, clearly not enough. ®