You sign in and the desktop never shows up. Microsoft has confirmed it.

You type the PIN, the lock screen slides away, and then nothing. Black. No taskbar, no icons, no wallpaper. The mouse pointer still moves, so the machine is clearly alive, it just never gets round to drawing the desktop.

Microsoft opened a known issue describing exactly that on 25 September, and it is still marked only as mitigated. The update it traces back to is KB5120998, the optional preview released on 27 August, along with the cumulative updates that have landed since. All four current versions of Windows 11 are listed: 24H2, 25H2, 26H1 and 26H2. What fails is Windows Explorer, the program responsible for drawing the desktop itself, and the event logs on affected PCs show it crashing.

Microsoft adds that the reports have come mainly from Azure Virtual Desktop machines using FSLogix profiles, which is office equipment rather than anything in a living room, and that it shows up more often on older user profiles. The ordinary home editions are listed as affected platforms all the same.

The way out takes about ten seconds. Press Ctrl, Shift and Escape together, which opens Task Manager even when the rest of the screen is empty. Pick Run new task, type explorer.exe, press OK, and the desktop appears. You will be doing that at every sign-in until a proper fix ships, and Microsoft has promised one in a future update without saying when. If it is updates themselves that have started failing or hanging on your PC, that is a different problem, and Tendvane's Windows Update repair wizard is the thing to point at it.