Latest Windows 10 Update Breaks Windows Media Player, Win32 Apps In General (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The important data loss bug that interrupted the rollout of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, version 1809, may be fixed, but it turns out there are plenty of other weird problems with the release. As spotted by Paul Thurrott, the update also breaks the seek bar in Windows Media Player when playing "specific files." Microsoft does promise to fix the bug, but the timeframe is vaguely open-ended: it will be "in an upcoming release."

Also in the "how did that happen" category comes another bug: some Win32 programs can't be set as the default program for a given file type. So if you want certain files to always open in Notepad, for example, you're currently out of luck. A fix for this is promised by the end of the month. Setting default program associations is something that's been in Windows for 20-something years, so it's a little alarming that it should be broken. On top of this, there continue to be complaints that Windows 10 version 1809 doesn't work with iCloud, and machines with the iCloud client are currently blacklisted to prevent them from receiving the 1809 update. It's not immediately clear whose fault this one is -- it could be Microsoft's, but it's also possible that Apple is to blame.

Comments

Re:At this point if you told me

[hairyfeet]

Ironically Windows 8.1? Is a really good OS and is IMHO heads and shoulders above Win 10 as its not constantly being broken by Microshit patches.

Win 8.1 plus Classic Shell? Is Win 7 with better SSD support and faster boot times. I'll stick with 8.1 until it is no longer supported of Linux has full support for gaming thanks to Valve, I've seen enough of Win 10 shitting all over itself to know its not a good OS.

That's a rather misleading statement.

[jonadab]

> Setting default program associations is something that's
> been in Windows for 20-something years

This is... ok, not exactly outright wrong, but at least misleading.

I mean, yes, twenty-some years ago, Windows had the ability to set program associations. But that implementation is not in any way related to the current one, except in the most general "there's a way to set program associations" sense that applies just as well to other operating systems.

Microsoft's first implementation of this in Windows was in winfile.exe, which was deeply deprecated in Windows '95 and does not exist at all in any recent version of Windows. The second iteration, in the first version of Windows Explorer, involved the Windows registry and was somewhat more complicated in its implementation but still conceptually similar to the first version: for any given filename extension, you could specify one program that would be used to open it; and that was it. This got redone when Windows Explorer went through its little identity crisis ("Of course it's integrated with the web browser..." "What? Web browser? No, no, no."), leaving a legacy of associations based on things other than the filename extension (in addition to the ones that are based on extension), and at some point gained the ability for programs to register themselves at install time as _capable_ of handling a given file format, so the "Open With..." context menu could offer multiple options. Then the "set program access/defaults" wizard was added to let people specify which of the options should get the double-click action for certain important formats and tasks. That implementation, or a descendant of it, still exists in Windows 7 (I think; unless it was redone another time that I didn't notice) but was never ported over to Eight/Ten, which have their _own_ implementations of file associations, which have gone through changes repeatedly because, frankly, they're unnecessarily complex and thus buggy.

But yeah, sure, just say this is a feature that's been there for twenty years and just suddenly broke unexpectedly. Reality is overrated.