Microsoft quietly fixed Windows 11 Settings Group Policy after it broke it and told no one

While Patch Tuesday updates, which are deployed every second Tuesday of the month, are meant to be the most important releases as they add security fixes and other new features, oftentimes, they do tend to introduce bugs and some of them are pretty major ones.

For example, recently on Windows 10 22H2, an issue popped up wherein the October 2023 Patch Tuesday failed installation with the error message "8007000D (ERROR_INVALID_DATA)." Microsoft released a Group Policy fix to resolve the issue. This past week, the company confirmed separately that this bug fix worked on version 21H2 as well.

Speaking of Group Policies, the one for October on Windows 11 (KB5031354) led to a problem wherein the 'Settings Page Visibility' policy would fail to apply or the Settings app would crash, and this was causing major inconvenience and annoyance to the affected IT admins and system admins across enterprises.

.t.o.j., a Microsoft forum member wrote in their thread:

The installation of KB5031354 (OS Build 22621.2428) causes a malfunction of the GPO-setting "settings visibility page".

 

The value of the GPO-setting is filled with settings that are accessible for our domain users : "ShowOnly:easeofaccess-audio;yourinfo;defaultapps;bluetooth;printers;mousetouchpad;typing;usb;easeofaccess-closedcaptioning; ...."

 

After the removal of KB5031354 the GPO-setting "settings visibility page" is applied correctly again.

User Abel Ong also had the same query as they posted a question on the Microsoft Q&A section alongside their findings:

I want to apply the Settings Page Visibility policy for an office environment that consists of mainly Windows 11 computers. To my knowledge, this policy allows administrators to hide/show only specific settings pages to users and I intend to show only the Display and Printers & Scanners menus. The option I set for the policy was: showonly:display;printers

 

However, after configuring the policy and applying it, the settings app on the Windows 11 computers kept crashing before it can open.

 

[...]

 

I have done some testing on my own and here are the things I found out:

 

After every change I make to the GPO, I force a gpupdate on a user computer and check gpresult if the GPO is being applied and it is, its not being filtered out.

 

• I have tried to apply the policy exclusively on user configuration and computer configuration or applying on both computer and user configuration but it still crashed the settings app either way.
• The policy worked with both the hide and showonly options when it was applied to a Windows 10 computer.
• The policy worked when I used hide instead of showonly as the option, it successfully hid the menus I specified and did not crash the settings app.
• I tried accessing the settings app and its subsequent pages through Run and CMD but it still crashes.
• Logged on the same user on different computers, settings still crashed.
• Used SFC to scan for corrupt system files but there were none.

 

I checked Event Viewer and there were errors saying that the settings app is crashing due to an unknown reason.

Although it was not mentioned as part of known issues, it looks like Microsoft has managed to fix the issue with the latest Patch Tuesday (KB5032190), according to user reports online. However, since it was not documented as a known issue, it hasn't been marked as a resolved issue either.

David Sosnowski, who posted this as an answer to the Q&A query above, writes:

We've had a case open with Microsoft, appears it was a known bug in KB5031354. They have resolved in the November 2023 W11 Cumulative update KB5032190. I have tested today on a similarly affected test machine post KB5032190 install and it appears to be working normally once again.

Hence, the Settings app should no longer crash and the Settings GP should work as intended. If you happen to be one of the affected users, you should check if this bug persists post-application of this month's Patch Tuesday. In that case, getting in touch with Microsoft may be the only option.

Via: Borncity

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