Microsoft confirms problems with opening XPS documents in Windows 10 and 11

Microsoft has notified Windows 10 and 11 users about a new known issue in the operating system. According to the Windows Health Dashboard documentation, Windows currently struggles with opening specific XPS documents (Microsoft's alternative to Adobe PDF, which has nothing to do with the Dell XPS lineup).

Besides the inability to open XPS and OXPS documents in non-English languages, XPS Viewer stops responding and starts hogging CPU and RAM resources until it crashes upon reaching 2.5GB of RAM usage.

After installing KB5014666 or later updates, XPS Viewer might be unable to open XML Paper Specification (XPS) documents in some non-English languages, including some Japanese and Chinese character encodings. This issue affects both XML Paper Specification (XPS) and Open XML Paper Specification (OXPS) files. When encountering this issue, you may receive an error, "This page cannot be displayed" within XPS Viewer or it might stop responding and have high CPU usage with continually increasing memory usage. When the error is encountered, if XPS Viewer is not closed it might reach up to 2.5GB of memory usage before closing unexpectedly.

Microsoft says the problem originates from KB5014666 and KB5014666 (Windows 10 19044.1806 and Windows 11 22000.778), released on June 26 and 28. The company is busy investigating the bug and promises to release a fix in the upcoming releases. Unfortunately, there are no temporary workarounds.

It is worth noting that the problem will not bother the vast majority of regular Windows 10 consumers. Apart from the fact that the XPS format failed to gain traction, Microsoft stopped bundling Windows 10 with XPS Viewer in version 1803. Still, you can install XPS Viewer as an optional Windows component in the Settings app.

The broken XPS Viewer app is not the only known problem Microsoft is investigating. The company recently confirmed that Windows updates released after June 28 might cause issues with USB printers.

Microsoft confirms problems with opening XPS documents in Windows 10 and 11