14 DAY TRIAL // As it happens every month, the July 2020 Patch Tuesday rollout brought several new cumulative updates to Windows 10 users, including those running the recently released May 2020 Update, or version 2004.
The update that these users are getting is KB4565503, and the easiest way to tell if it’s already installed is to click the Start menu and type winver. If the OS build number is 19041.388, then the update is already there on your device.
On the official KB page of this update, Microsoft says it’s aware of just one issue with KB4565503.
“When using some apps, such as Microsoft Excel, users of the Microsoft Input Method Editor (IME) for Chinese and Japanese might receive an error, or the app might stop responding or close when attempting to drag using the mouse,” the company explains.
However, it looks like cumulative update KB4565503 also fails to install on some devices, as discovered recently by TechDows.
Windows 10 users are discussing this problem on Microsoft’s support forums here, and a Microsoft engineer has also responded to the thread to confirm that others are experiencing similar problems.
“We have noticed some users are reporting the same issue with yours,” the engineer says.
Nevertheless, at this point, it’s still not known how widespread the whole thing is and whether devices where the update isn’t yet installed should be configured to block the update altogether.
Given that Microsoft hasn’t yet added the failed installs to the known issues section on the aforementioned KB page, there’s a good chance this is only happening on a small set of devices, so for now, you’re just recommended to proceed with caution and create a backup before anything else.
As for how to fix the whole thing, the Microsoft engineer suggests two workarounds, one that’s a lot less convenient than the other.
The first thing you should try is manually downloading the cumulative update and installing it on your device. This is something that has helped in the past as well when other cumulative updates failed to install, and it mostly indicates that the problem resides in the way Windows Update unpacks the update and launches the installation process.
The most recent cumulative update for version 2004, including KB4565503, can be found on Microsoft’s Update Catalog page, but make sure that you download the correct version for your device. If you get the wrong package, the installation won’t start.
If this doesn’t work and you still come across the same issue, then the Microsoft engineer recommends reinstalling Windows 10 in repair mode. Certainly, this isn’t something that many people are willing to do, but it could help on devices that are locked in an infinite installation boot – even if the update fails to install and you manage to get back to the desktop, Windows Update then downloads it once again and offers to relaunch the installation process, only to fail once again and thus repeat the whole thing.
New cumulative updates are obviously expected next month when Microsoft ships other Patch Tuesday fixes, and an optional update for Windows 10 version 2004 should also go live next week. However, it’s still not clear if a fix for this problem is supposed to be included, so for the time being, users are all alone in their struggle to deal with this cumulative update headache.
If nothing else works, you can just restore the device to a previous state and then block the update from being offered to your computer on Windows Update to prevent the issue from happening until a fix lands.