Windows 10 1809 - Desktop icons displaying blank after August (KB4511553) and September 2019 update (KB4512578)

Good morning,
There have been a some reports on my company since last month that after applying the Windows 10 1809 cumulative updates (KB4511553) and/or (KB4512578), some of the desktop icons go blank (they lose the ico image). The links are still accesible with no issue though. This is kind of intermittent since some icons are blank sometimes and if you log off and back on, some other icons might be blank
image.

I did some troubleshooting on one of the machines: i ran sfc /scannow which found some corrupt files and repaired them. I also tried repairing the icon cache db. The issue was still present. So i tried removing the Cumulative update for September (the local desktop tech had already removed the Cumulative update from August (KB4511553), thus reverting back to July’s update, which he reported had fixed the issue) and reverted back to the July’s update. It indeed solved the problem and the icos are back. I rebooted, logged off/on the workstation several times after this, and the icons are still working fine.

The strange thing is that we have other win 10 1809 workstations on our test group which are up to date with updates (including September’s) and they don’t have any issues with the desktop icos.

Wondering if any of you had experienced something similar with these Windows updates and if so, how did you fix the issue

Thank you
Gianni Laverde

Yes, this is being pretty widely reported in the Microsoft forums. Last I heard they were still investigating. We should probably expect another round of patch re-releases.

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Hi Jason, Thanks for your reply. Interesting that Microsoft has not noted this in their bulletin as a ‘known issue with this update’. Even though it doesn’t affect the functionality of the links, users still get bothered by having their icons missing.
On another note, just curious if you have experienced issues when restarting your windows 10 workstations getting hung on the ‘restarting’ screen and users having to force shutdown? some WIn10 users have been reporting this issue. We haven’t made any major GPO configurations or system configurations other than the recent updates installed.

My apology, I think I confused that issue with the broken Start menu, which is being reported a bit more widely than Microsoft acknowledges at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-information/status-windows-10-1903

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