News

PowerShell Left Inoperable After Latest Windows 10 Update

• By Kurt Mackie
• 08/26/2016

The Aug. 23 update to Windows 10 breaks PowerShell and should be avoided at the moment, according to Microsoft.

A fix for the problem is planned with the next Windows update release, which will happen on Aug. 30, Microsoft indicated. Details about the problematic update, known as KB3176934, were explained in this Aug. 23 PowerShell blog post.

Name Confusion
Adding to the confusion is that KB3176934 was earlier released under the "KB3176932" name, which was a mistake by Microsoft. There's a whole Microsoft community forum page devoted to the topic, "Where is KB3176932?," but so far no one has answered the question there. Instead, Microsoft explained in its PowerShell blog post that it kept the old URL reference, but the update should be called KB3176934:

The KB number is KB3176934. The original post had the incorrect number. Since we sent links out to the original KB, we did not want to change the URL so the information in the article is now correct and the URL is a by product [sic] of the original mistake.

Some organizations may have installed KB3176932, but this misnumbered update does the same thing as KB3176934. Both bring Windows 10 version 1607 (the "anniversary update") to build 14393.82, as shown in Microsoft's Windows 10 update history page.

Specifically, KB3176934 breaks Desired State Configuration (DSC), which is a PowerShell scheme for keeping servers in an optimal configuration state. Microsoft dropped a file from the build which caused DSC operations to return an "Invalid Property" error message. In addition, the PowerShell "implicit remoting" capability is broken with KB3176934.

Microsoft is telling organizations to remove KB3176934 if affected by those problems. Or, if organizations are using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) to control updates, then they should not approve this update.

Other Issues
Microsoft also warned this week that the latest Windows 10 version 1607 update can surface applications that IT pros may have removed with Windows 10 version 1511. The problem is a known flaw with the update at this point, and Microsoft is just offering remediation tips so far.

There are many other complaints about the Windows 10 version 1607 anniversary update, but they've elicited less of an active response from Microsoft.

One of those complaints is a system freeze issue. Microsoft acknowledged receiving "a small number of reports of Windows 10 freezing after installing the Anniversary Update on systems with the operating system stored on a solid-state drive (SSD) and apps and data stored on a separate drive," according to a Microsoft community forum post. It plans to respond in that forum post with further information about the issue at some point. There's also a Reddit forum devoted to the topic.

IT pros also are complaining that Windows 10 version 1607 gets stuck when WSUS is used to download updates. The solution, according to this Microsoft community forum post, is to add "update KB3176929 as a package in the task sequence." More discussion can be found in this Spiceworks forum post.

InfoWorld author Woody Leonhard has been tracking overall problems with the Windows 10 version 1607 anniversary updates in a series of articles. He noted recently that the freeze problem hasn't been fixed with the Aug. 23 update release.

In addition, an Aug. 2 update to Windows 10 version 1607 broke the use of Logitech C920 Webcams, a problem noted by Thurrott writer Brad Sams. He explained that Windows 10 dropped support for the MJPEG and H.264 streaming media formats in favor of YUY2 encoding, which broke Webcams using the other encoding methods.

Microsoft explained in a forum page that it had intentionally "filtered out" MJPEG and H.264 to get features working with Skype and Lync. Further down in that forum page, Microsoft promised that it's investigating the issue and that "once we have that, MJPEG and H.264 will no longer be filtered out, so your applications should continue to work as before without any changes." This problem wasn't fixed with the Aug. 23 update, Leonhard noted.