Some people woke up to a film poster where their wallpaper used to be

The pitch for Bing Wallpaper is that it puts a nice photograph on your desktop every day and otherwise stays out of the way. On 8 September a good number of people turned on their PC and found an advert for the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts eleven-film collection instead, complete with "Available Now" in the corner. Not everyone got it; the rollout varied by region and by machine. Those who did got the picture that sits behind everything they do all day turned into billboard space.

Microsoft has spent the past year saying it intends to reduce advertising in Windows 11, which is what makes this land badly. The company's defence is presumably the small print on the Bing Wallpaper download page, which mentions that the app shows "in-app notifications with promotional offers". A notification and your entire desktop are not the same object. There is form here too: back in October 2025 the app quietly gained a setting called "Desktop click opens Bing", switched on by default on some systems, which sent you to Bing.com when you clicked an empty part of the desktop. It was pulled after the complaints.

The important detail is that Bing Wallpaper is not part of Windows. It is a separate app you had to install, so the fix is Settings, then Apps, then Installed apps, find Bing Wallpaper and uninstall it. Windows has its own version of the same idea built in, Windows Spotlight, which you switch on under Personalisation and Background. Plenty of people are taking that route this week.

An app that installs itself as a startup item and later changes what it does is a fair description of most of the clutter on an ageing PC. Tendvane's Safety check for unwanted software lists what is set to launch with Windows and what has quietly attached itself to your browser, so something you agreed to in 2024 is not still making decisions for you in 2026.