Windows 10's News and Interest widget blurry? Try this Optional Update

Microsoft recently enabled the new News and Interest taskbar widget for a billion Windows 10 users, and immediately many complained that it looks terrible on their PC, with the text being blurry.

Microsoft acknowledged the issue, and has now released a potential fix.

Microsoft has released an optional update for Windows 10 1909 and 1809, with KB5003698 taking Windows 10 1909 to Build 18363.1645.

Microsoft said a similar update to Windows 10, version 20H2, Windows 10, version 21H1, and Windows 10, version 2004 will be following soon.

The preview update has the following highlights:

• Updates an issue that prevents certain screen reader apps from running.
• Updates an issue that causes a loss of audio when you connect a second external monitor.
• Updates an issue that might cause a VPN to fail. The error message is, “There are no more files”.
• Updates an issue that causes blurry text on the news and interests button on the Windows taskbar for some screen resolutions.
• Updates an issue with Search box graphics on the Windows taskbar that occurs if you right-click the taskbar and turn off News and interests. This graphics issue is especially visible when using dark mode.

Improvements and fixes coming with this non-security update:

• Addresses an issue that prevents sorting from working properly when using multiple versions of National Language Support (NLS) sorting.

• Addresses a performance issue in the MultiByteToWideChar() function that occurs when it is used in a non-English locale.

• Addresses an issue that fails to properly manage touch input related memory before a user session ends.
• Addresses an issue that results in outdated group membership listings. This issue occurs because the Group Policy service (GPSVC) makes infrequent updates to the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) session. As a result, this slows the propagation of changes the Active Directory (AD) administrator makes to user or group membership.
• Addresses an issue that causes Windows to stop working when it uses AppLocker to validate a file that has multiple signatures. The error is 0x3B.
• Addresses an issue with the Set-RuleOption PowerShell command that fails to provide the option for the Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) policy to treat files signed with an expired certificate as unsigned.
• Addresses an issue that might cause BitLocker to go into recovery mode after updating the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) firmware. This occurs when the “Interactive logon: Machine account lockout Threshold” policy is set and there were incorrect password attempts.
• Addresses an issue that prevents certain screen reader apps from running when Hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) is enabled.
• Addresses an issue that causes Windows to generate many AppLocker or SmartLocker success events.
• Improves the accuracy and efficiency of sensitive data analysis in the Microsoft 365 Endpoint data loss prevention (DLP) Classification Engine.
• Addresses an issue with the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) VPN service on remote access server (RAS) servers. Periodically, users cannot connect a VPN to the server over the IKE protocol. This issue might start several hours or days after restarting the server or restarting the IKEEXT service. Some users can connect while many others cannot connect because the service is in DoS Protection mode, which limits incoming connection attempts.
• Addresses an issue that might cause a VPN to fail after renewing a user auto-enrolled certificate. The error message is, “There are no more files”.
• Adds new glyphs to the InkFree.ttf font family for European languages.
• Addresses an issue that causes a loss of audio when you connect a second external monitor.
• Addresses a metadata encoding issue that causes Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) music files to become unplayable if you change their title, artist, or other metadata. For more information, see FLAC encoded music file is corrupted when metadata is edited in Windows Explorer.
• Adds support for the .hif file extension for High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) images.
• Addresses an issue that causes Remote Desktop sessions to stop responding while the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is enabled.
• Adds support for the USBTest and MeasurementClass.
• Addresses an issue in Adamsync.exe that affects the syncing of large Active Directory subtrees.
• Addresses an error that occurs when the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) bind cache is full, and the LDAP client library receives a referral.
• Addresses a redirector stop error that is caused by a race condition that occurs when the system deletes binding objects when connections close.
• Addresses an issue that might cause a stop error when you run SmbConnectStress for a prolonged duration.
• Addresses an issue that prevents users from setting or querying disk quotas on the C drive.
• Addresses an issue that causes blurry text on the news and interests button on the Windows taskbar for some display configurations.
• Addresses an issue with Search box graphics on the Windows taskbar that occurs if you use the taskbar’s context menu to turn off News and interests. This graphics issue is especially visible when using dark mode.

KB5003698 can be found by checking for optional updates in Settings or by downloading it directly from the  Microsoft Update Catalog.

Let us know in the comments if it fixes the News and Interest problem on your device.