Microsoft appears to have shipped a buggy Windows 10 update even after negative Insider feedback

Two days ago Microsoft released KB4512941, after only a day of testing in the Release Preview Ring. At the time the update had no known issues, but it appears that this was merely because Microsoft did not look hard enough.

WindowsLatest reports that a number of users are complaining of high CPU usage by SearchUI.exe, part of Cortana, via the FeedbackHub and Reddit (1, 2).

The users complain of SearchUI.exe taking 30-40% of CPU usage and despite this being unresponsive.

“After installing KB4512941 (OS Build 18362.329) the pop-out window with the search results stays blank, SearchUI.exe is constantly using CPU and ~200MB of memory,” a user documented the problem on Microsoft’s Feedback Hub.

“Cortana is consistently running above 35% CPU usage and 150 MB memory as reported by Task Manager, for at least one day now. Despite this fact, using the Search button next to the Start Menu pops up a dialog that will not display any items upon entering any search query, even after waiting for several minutes,” another user complained about the CPU usage on Feedback Hub.

More worryingly, it appears Windows Insider testers had already picked up and reported the issue in the Feedback Hub, but that Microsoft failed to respond to this.

Regular readers will know this is reminiscent of the data deletion bug in the October 2018 Update, which had also been picked up by testers but ignored by Microsoft. More concerning is that Microsoft has said they would make changes to their process to pick up issues which did not have a lot of upvotes but which would still cause issues for end-users. These do not appear to be working.

If you one of those affected the simplest fix may be to uninstall the update. To do this:

• Hit Windows+I to open the Settings app.
• Click the “Update & security” option.
• On the Update & security screen, click the “View update history” option.
• On the next screen, click the “Uninstall updates” link.
• Select the update (KB4512941), and then click the “Uninstall” button.

At the time of writing “Microsoft is not currently aware of any issues with this update.“