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Microsoft broke Windows 11 builds with adverts

by on06 September 2021


Start Menu and taskbar crashing


If you needed a reason not to upgrade to Windows 11, this story might to it – Windows 11 builds in the Dev and Beta channels started crashing their Start Menu and taskbar were crashing because Vole thought it was a good idea to start serving adverts.

Microsoft did publish a fix. The ad is for Microsoft Teams, and how it's integrated into Windows 11. As with most of the ads that are injected into Windows, this should still pop up as a notification even if you have all notifications turned off.

Strangely the fact that Vole is serving up adverts is not getting people’s goat but how the Windows 11 shell can be so fragile that ads can crash it. Basically it means that a cloud service can break Windows 11.

Windows in 2021 has a ton of components in it that have to grab content from the cloud at any given time, from the Bing lockscreen wallpaper to Windows Update to advertisements that come from Microsoft.

Anyway it does not look like Vole is to scale back on its advertisements in Windows any time soon. Instead, it's just going to fix the glitch. Might be time to move to Linux on the desktop.

 

Last modified on 06 September 2021
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