Patch Tuesday: Profile Issues Continue to Plague Windows 10 Cumulative Updates

Second verse, same as the first.

In a perfect world, OS updates would be painless. But, as we've all experienced from Microsoft over the past few years, patching nirvana is just a dream. Obviously, we all want this to work. Having to only deploy a single update to fix every currently known issue has strong merit.

Yesterday I alluded to how fundamentally wrong it is for Microsoft to deliver updates for Windows 10 in bulk. By combining feature and OS updates with security patches, there's a huge potential for things to wrong quickly. In the past, the company would offer updates individually, allowing companies to test and vet each one before deploying into a live environment. With the seemingly new strategy for Windows 10 updates, it's an all-or-nothing approach. Gone is the ability to properly control and manage updates on the business network using tried-and-true methods.

Case in point…

Two weeks ago Microsoft delivered its first Cumulative Update (CU) for Windows 10. It worked for most, but slowly the number of reports began to grow suggesting that something was wrong with it. Many Windows 10 users were stuck in an endless reboot loop where the CU would attempt to install, never complete successfully, and the computer would reboot to roll back the update. On reboot, the process would start all over again.

This week, for August's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft produced and delivered a new CU (KB3081436) that was supposed to be error-free. New reports, show that's not the case and that the new CU suffers from the exact same problem as the first one.

Sifting through the Microsoft community forums, there's a thread that details the issue: Cumulative Update for Windows 10 (KB3081436) fails to install multiple times, reboots 3x before restoring to previous state.

I've been watching and reporting on Patch Tuesday woes for, it seems like, forever, so I know first-hand the issues Windows users have experienced. I said early on, when Windows 10 was first announced, that for its new strategy for updating to work, Microsoft needed to take a step back first and revamp and fix its QA process for patches. We're now two weeks into working with a public version of Windows 10 that has had two major, cumulative updates and issues are still as common as before.

If this keeps up, I fear that Microsoft is going to have a tough time selling Windows 10 to the business world.