Windows 11 24H2 Bug Is Crashing Key System Components, Here Are The Workarounds

If you feel like Windows 11 has been trending less and less stable over the last few months, you're not imagining things. Microsoft has confirmed a nasty bug in Windows 11 version 24H2 (stemming from cumulative updates starting in July 2025) that's knocking out critical system components. According to support article KB5072911, several core UI features like the Start menu, Taskbar, Explorer, and the Settings app may fail or crash after provisioning a PC with the affected updates.

At the heart of the problem is a timing issue: certain modular XAML dependency packages—specifically MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS, Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS, and MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core—aren't registering quickly enough after the update. When that happens, shell processes that depend on those packages try to spin up before their dependencies are ready, and the result is everything from explorer.exe crashing—causing the taskbar to vanish—to the StartMenuExperienceHost failing, which naturally results in a busted start menu.

Microsoft says this is most likely to hit during first-time user logon (right after the update) or in non-persistent environments like virtual desktops, where app packages must be reinstalled every login. In short: the house that Windows built admits that a core part of the operating system's UI plumbing is misfiring, and there's no "just wait for the next feature update" fix yet.

That said, though; yes, there are workarounds. Microsoft recommends manually re-registering the missing XAML packages via PowerShell, so they're correctly recognized by the system. You can do this by running:

Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode
Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode
Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode

For non-persistent setups like a VDI, the above trick won't work. Instead, Microsoft suggests deploying a synchronous logon script that runs before Explorer launches, effectively blocking the shell from starting too early and giving those packages a chance to properly register. You can find the text of that script at Microsoft's support blog post.