Shortly after this month's massive Patch Tuesday dump dropped, several people reported that when they rebooted after installing the patch, their desktops appeared to be wiped clean — icons went missing, wallpaper replaced, desktop data nowhere to be seen.
Last night, Lawrence Abrams on BleepingComputer came up with a comprehensive diagnosis:
Based on the reports by affected users, it appears that a bug in the KB4532693 update is loading up a temporary profile to be used during the update process and failing to restore the user's profile when done.
Which explains all of the symptoms I’ve seen [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].
Many people are in a tizzy — their desktop icons are gone, they can’t log onto their usual Admin account, and their files most definitely aren’t where they left them. Abrams has a bit of reassurance:
The good news is that the update is not wiping your data, but rather renaming the original user profile in the C:\Users folder. If you are affected by this issue, you can look in C:\Users and see if you have a renamed profile ending in .000 or .bak.
I’ve seen several reports that uninstalling the KB 4532693 patch solves the problem.
Günter Born picked up the baton overnight (U.S. time) and has come up with a tantalizing observation:
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.
Of course, Microsoft hasn’t said anything. The official Win10 Release Information Status page hasn’t been updated since November. The Feedback Hub is useless, as usual (try searching for “KB 4532693”). The official Answers Forum doesn't have a clue.
So we’re back to helping Microsoft crowdsource patching bug reports for its multibillion-dollar product.
Did your desktop disappear after installing this month’s patches? Are you running Avira or Avast? Please let us know on AskWoody.
I swear, if somebody tells me again how Windows patches are getting better, I’m gonna bust a blood vessel.