Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away. The company released the KB4517211 cumulative update to Windows 10 on September 26, and that update fixed several issues with the operating system, but Windows Latest reported yesterday that it also caused problems with printers for some users.
The report said that numerous people have taken to Microsoft's community forum, Feedback Hub, and the Google support forum to complain about not being able to print anything after installing the KB4517211 update. Uninstalling the update appears to address the problem, which reappears if the update is reinstalled, so it's unlikely the blame lies anywhere else. It's not clear if the issue affects printers from specific manufacturers or not.
Other people have said the KB4517211 update caused problems with the Start menu. The update failed to install on a few systems as well. As we've pointed out ad nauseum, complaints on social media aren't reliable ways to figure out the scope of the problem, especially for an optional update that had to be manually installed via the Settings app. (Although even a fraction of the 900-million-plus systems running Windows 10 is a lot.)
So the bad news is that Microsoft once again broke something people rely on in a Windows update. The good news is that at least this time it didn't make a known issue even worse, like it's done several times already, with the most recent example being a serious problem with Windows Defender that was introduced when it tried to fix a different bug. That's progress! Now the updates aren't totally counterproductive; just mildly frustrating.
