Two bugs people had learned to live with are now actually fixed

Good news arrives quietly. Microsoft's release health page now lists two Windows 11 faults as resolved by KB5127648, the update that went out on 13 October, and both had been irritating people for weeks.

The first is the black screen after sign-in. You type your PIN, the lock screen slides away, and the desktop never draws, because Windows Explorer has crashed. It traced back to KB5120998, the optional preview from 27 August, and we wrote about it when Microsoft confirmed the issue. Versions 24H2, 25H2, 26H1 and 26H2 were all listed. Microsoft's line now: install an update released on or after 13 October and you no longer need the Ctrl, Shift, Escape, explorer.exe routine.

The second is more likely to have annoyed you without ever being traced to anything. After the 22 September preview update, KB5124010, applications that rely on Windows to decode AC-3 audio, which is Dolby Digital, started closing unexpectedly. Some would not launch at all. Others ran fine until you played music or a video. Older games and media players were the usual casualties, since most modern apps bring their own decoder. That is fixed in the same update.

Not everything on the list is closed. USB Audio Class 1.0 devices that went silent after the September update are still only partly sorted, and a Remote Desktop failure is marked mitigated rather than fixed, though that one is office equipment. Worth checking you actually have October's update, especially if you had paused updates while the black screens were happening. If Windows Update itself is the thing refusing to cooperate, Tendvane's Windows Update repair wizard is built for exactly that.