[German]There are reports that cumulative update KB4532693 for Windows 10 versions 1903 and 1909 dated February 11, 2020, is causing significant issues for some users. Desktop gone, files gone, icons gone and more.
Update KB4532693 for Windows 10 Version 190x
Cumulative Update KB4532693 is available for Windows 10 version 1903, for Windows 10 version 1909, and for Windows Server version 1903 and Windows Server version 1909. It contains quality improvements but no new operating system features. I mentioned the update in the blog post Patchday Windows 10-Updates (February 11, 2020).
Reports about issues
Shortly after the article was published, there was a first comment reporting about a freezing update installation. Then German blog reader Andre came with this user comment, reporting further issues.
After today’s update KB 4532693, PC started up normally again then came the horror, almost all programs and data gone, email, tax homepage everything gone, no folder left, to vomit […].
System recovery currently without success.
In a 2nd comment Andre reports that there are different problems on different systems. Other users report problems here and here. The last comment refers to this MS Answers forum thread, where a user complains about lost files in his profile.
why has the latest windows update moved all my files into another user folder ending in .000?
When I closed doen my PC last night it started doing updates and was taking a long time so I left it and went to bed. This morning I logged on – no problems but I then realised (can’t remember how) that my files had all moved on to another folder in the c drive ending in .000. After doing some seearching for advise on line I restarted the PC several times but its not changed. I have even closed down completely to see if this made a difference – it didnt. I am now worried that I will close down again and from what I have read this may be a temporary file.
I am not a computer whizz and reading some of the things I have has worred me that I could mess up trying to correct it. One suggestion I have seen is to remove the latest updates – there were 6 in total – KB4532693, 4537759, 4534132, 4528759, 4538674 and 1909.
Please can anyone help. My work is stored on Dropbox so I assume that will be safe but its everything else I’m worried about – documents, photos etc.
Then I saw over the following tweet that Woody Leonhard has picked it up on his page in the meantime.
Had a family members machine after the late Jan patch that loaded at temp profile. After going into the registry and deleting the entry for the temp profile and removing the bak from the original profile entry and rebooting, it returned to normal.
— Russ Gee (@russgee) February 12, 2020
Woody refers to the 2nd post in this MS Answers forum post, post where someone complains about lost desktop icons, wrong desktop background etc. People are logged in under a temporary user profile after installing the update. After uninstalling the update everything is back to normal.
A second user notes in the above tweet that he was able to fix this via the registry entries of the profile service. I once had the German article Anmeldung scheitert wegen defektem Benutzerprofil 10 years ago here in the blog, which shows these approaches.
If you run into these problems, my recommendation is, that you should uninstall the update and then set the update delay to one week. If you have antivirus software installed from 3rd party vendors, give it a try and uninstall this AV software and install the update again.
Addendum: Currently I’m collecting information about the root cause. One user reported, that a bunch of 50 machines was affected, all using AVIRA antivirus, while the other machines without issues didn’t have AVIRA installed. But this is only a single voice. If you are affected, left a comment with the information, which AV software is used.