Windows September 2019 Updates: more search woes and Telemetry

[harlan4096]

Microsoft released security updates and regular updates for all versions of Windows on yesterday's September 2019 Patch Tuesday. It does not take long, usually, before an assessment can be made on the quality of the released updates.

Microsoft fixed the high CPU usage issue that affected some users on Windows 10 version 1903. Reports about the issue started to appear on several Internet forums after Microsoft published the cumulative update KB4512941 for Windows 10 version 1903 in early September.

The high CPU usage was caused by the Cortana process SearchUI.exe that caused the load on the system. Some administrators uninstalled the update to fix the issue, others managed to fix it by enabling Bing Web Search on the system it it was disabled.

The release notes for KB4515384 for Windows 10 version 1903 and Windows Server version 1903 highlight that Microsoft fixed the issue:

Addresses an issue that causes high CPU usage from SearchUI.exe for a small number of users. This issue only occurs on devices that have disabled searching the web using Windows Desktop Search.

I received several emails in the past 24 hours by users who informed me that search is still broken on their systems after installing the latest patch. A thread on Reddit provides further user reports on the issue.

According to the reports, search is not working for some users. Whenever they run searches, a blank results page is shown; this appears to be the most common issue that users experience.

The number of systems affected by this is unclear. Microsoft has not acknowledged the issue.

Administrators could restore an earlier version of the operating system to fix the issue. It is too early to tell if workarounds, e.g. changing Bing Search parameters, may address the issue as well.
...

Continue Reading