Tag: Windows Defender

Microsoft Defender Borks up the Start menu icons

Paul

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Microsoft Creates issues

This all started on Friday the 13th, 2023. We all started getting tickets galore for this issue, when we first saw this issue we thought it mgiht be something to do with company’s policies being changed and someone didn’t do their job testing it. Being that I am doing my job and trying to solve the issues that are at hand, I didn’t think twice that it was more globally than just our little corner of the company. As we get back into the office Monday we get even more of these tickets where the icons have disappeared and the little work around we sent out friday night still hasn’t solve some of the issues. Icons from all sorts of places have disappeared including stuff I didn’t even think would happen.

Well there it is, it seems Microsoft released an update that caused all the icons to disappear or not to function at all. I’ve been dealing with this issue for the past 5 days as our company scrambles to get the issue resolved for their employees. We’ve learned a few things and I will be glad to share it with you.

Icon restoration

There are several ways I’ve found that works to help restore the icons in the Start Menu.   One of the easiest way is to go to “Add and remove programs” and modify the app that isn’t showing up and Repair or reinstall if that is the option.  This is what we had to do at our location but that isn’t all we are having to do.  We are also having to do this for like Adobe and even Office 2016 but I am sure this affects all versions of Office.

Other ways you can restore icon is to registry edit the default icons and make them get repopulated with the right Icons.  I even go into default apps and reset that to help push the apps back into place.

Another way people have found tofix this issue at least with Office apps is to run it siliently and let it repair it selve in the background:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\OfficeClickToRun.exe” scenario=Repair platform=x86 culture=en-us DisplayLevel=False

Microsoft Defender

According to Microsoft it was a the Microsoft Defender ASR rules that caused all this in the first place.   I don’t Know how many IT Admins are happy right now, I am sure not because of all this that happened but It really makes you wonder how this got past the pre-test phase and how anyone would push out an update like this that caused so much trouble.

Many people are wondering how this happened but My real question is will it happened again.  This isn’t going to be a big post but a short one to help those fix the issue at hand and hopefully we get it solved as quickly as possible and everyone get’s back to a normal routine.