The movable taskbar is out of preview, and the black wallpaper bug went with it

On 28 August we told you to leave KB5120998 alone. It was the optional preview that finally let you move the Windows 11 taskbar off the bottom of the screen after five years, and people who installed it were losing their custom mouse pointers and finding their wallpaper swapped for solid black. The advice was to wait for the mandatory September update. It has arrived, and it is better news than expected.

KB5124008 landed on 8 September, taking Windows 11 25H2 to build 26200.9445 and 24H2 to 26100.9445, and Microsoft's release notes name both bugs directly. One entry addresses customised mouse cursor settings not displaying correctly. Another addresses desktop backgrounds and other personalisation settings failing to load. The known issues section for this update is empty.

What arrives in exchange: Settings, Personalisation, Taskbar now offers Left, Top, Right or Bottom under taskbar position, and Settings, Personalisation, Start gains a size dropdown with Small, Large and Automatic. There is a slimmer taskbar option too.

Two caveats before you go looking. Microsoft is releasing these through Controlled Feature Rollout, so installing the update is not the same as getting the options; for plenty of machines it will be days or weeks yet. And this is a first attempt rather than the Windows 10 behaviour restored intact. You pick the position from a menu instead of dragging the taskbar where you want it, autohide only works while the taskbar sits at the bottom, and the slimmer setting shrinks the bar itself only in the top and bottom positions, though the icons get smaller either way.

If the settings have not appeared, the first thing worth ruling out is whether the update actually installed, because a stalled Windows Update can sit there for weeks looking perfectly healthy. Tendvane's Health score answers that in a line, which beats digging through update history.