This update was shipped to users on September 10

Sep 17, 2019 12:27 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft released Windows 10 cumulative update KB4515384 on September 10 as part of this month’s Patch Tuesday cycle.

According to the official KB page, this update comprises just three major changes, namely the typical security updates rolling out on Patch Tuesday, further mitigations against speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities, and a fix for a bug causing high CPU usage from the SearchUI.exe process.

At first glance, this isn’t such a heavy cumulative update, albeit as it is the case of every other such release, more improvements are most often made under the hood as well and Microsoft just decides it’s not worth sharing them with the rest of users.

Microsoft originally said it wasn’t aware of any issues in the update, which was somehow surprising, especially given that so many people previously complained of various errors experienced when or after installing cumulative updates.

Unfortunately for Windows 10 version 1903 users, cumulative update KB4515384 comes with a continuously-increasing list of issues, and by the looks of things, users keep coming across new problems on a daily basis.

Microsoft hasn’t acknowledged all of them, but the more we wait, the more we find out about things that no longer work correctly after installing this update.

As some users told us in comments to my article on KB4515384 issues here, this cumulative updates sometimes fails to install on their Windows 10 devices, albeit for now, this doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue.

On the other hand, Microsoft has already confirmed three different errors that you could come across after installing it.

First of all, the Input Method Editor (IME) could become unresponsive and cause high CPU usage, while on some devices, the Start menu and the Windows Desktop Search might fail to launch. This latter problem is actually the one hitting the biggest number of devices, as I’m seeing more and more users complaining of the very same bug every day.

Microsoft says it’s investigating the Start menu problem, but a fix isn’t available for now.

Then, audio in games is quiet or different than expected, Microsoft says, and this is all because the cumulative update comes with a change requested by Microsoft partners. The software giant has already reverted this change and says a full fix is on its way.

Unfortunately, all these problems, along with others that are yet to be acknowledged by Microsoft, such as this PIN login error, show that installing cumulative updates on a Windows 10 devices continues to be a Russian roulette than can easily go wrong at any moment.

From users’ perspective, however, there’s not much to do other than delaying the installation of these botched cumulative updates. The only problem is that Patch Tuesday releases also come with security improvements and not installing the updates means a device remains unprotected.

As far as Microsoft is concerned, there’s so much room for improvements when it comes to the quality of cumulative updates. And it all starts with the quality testing that the company should run before hitting the go-ahead button for production devices.

Most cumulative updates for the latest stable version of Windows 10 are tested with the help of users in the Windows Insider program. But more recently, the Insider program itself has become rather confusing for many, as users here are currently running three different versions of Windows 10, namely version 1903, 19H2, and 20H1.

Installing cumulative updates has been a risky thing to do from day one, and by the looks of things, Microsoft still has a hard time getting them right. While I always recommended people to update their devices as soon as patches come out, all these errors seem to suggest this is no longer the right way to go.

What’s your experience with the latest cumulative updates? Is updating on day one something that is still worth doing? Let me know what you think in the box after the jump.