I'm encountering some strange issues while testing a migration of my company's PCs from Windows 11 23H2 to 25H2. Specifically, I'm facing problems with .msi installations and applications that run as services, such as Netskope, Software Center, and the UserLock agent. After a few reboots, these programs seem to freeze and become unresponsive.
For example, Netskope's service runs, but the app doesn't fully initialize, showing a solid red icon in the notification area. Attempts to disable the service or uninstall it result in freezes and timeout errors. Similarly, Software Center displays similar issues with its service running but never opening properly, and it times out during attempts to stop it.
The UserLock agent also fails to start, giving a timeout error. I've noticed this isn't isolated to just these applications but affects others that run as services as well. All of this began with the upgrade to 25H2, as everything worked fine on 23H2, and no changes were made to the group policies or settings. After exhausting my research and troubleshooting options, I'm hoping to get some suggestions to tackle this problem, as it seems to be a symptom of a broader issue.
3 Answers
This could be a side effect of the August '25 patch. There are reports of similar problems affecting .msi installations.
Are the systems you're working on cloned versions, and did you use sysprep for them? That might be a factor here.
Have you tried using the Add or Remove Programs feature to repair the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables? It helped some of our workstations after feature updates that caused Software Center problems. However, I can't say for sure if it would resolve your issues since we've always ended up needing a complete reinstall anyway.
I did give that a shot, but since it's also a .msi installation, it ended up freezing and timing out just like the others.
Yes, we're using a standard image file in our SCCM task sequences, so they're essentially cloned. We did use sysprep for this. Some older systems were upgraded from a 23H2 .wim file, while newer ones are straight from a 25H2 .wim file, and both are experiencing the same issues.