Windows 10 Anniversary PowerShell and login freeze glitches finally patched

Hopefully an end to the teething problems

Two of the wider-reaching Windows 10 Anniversary Update bugs - a glitch which freezes machines at the account login screen on boot, and another which caused PowerShell to crash - have apparently now received fixes.

The so-called "login freeze" glitch, which has been rife since launch, has received an official fix in the form of update KB3176938. Microsoft's update blog on the matter says the company received "a small number of reports," which appears to be something of an understatement.

The bug seemed to be caused by a machine having multiple logical drives (partitions), with app data, according to Microsoft, having been manually moved data to another drive, which confused the Windows 10 login process and resulted in a hang.

While the patch has now arrived, it's difficult for users whose machine crashes on boot to even log in and apply it.

Apart from logging in with a second administrator account - which seems to work - Microsoft's official advice for installing the patch on an afflicted machine is either to use the Recovery Console by holding Shift when selecting Restart at the login screen, and then selecting "Go back to the previous build" (thus rolling back and having to patch all over again with the new update); or simply logging in via Safe Mode and doing it that way.

Meanwhile, the PowerShell issue, which appeared with Build 14393.82 on 23 August, was fixed with 31 August's release of Build 14393.105 - just as Microsoft promised last week.

PowerShell was crashing because a missing .MOF (Management Object Format) file was breaking PowerShell Desired State Configuration which IT administrators use to manage Windows 10's enterprise environment.

This build contains no new Windows 10 features at all, but was necessary to start fixing the number of bugs which seem to be plaguing Anniversary Update.