The Windows 10 Anniversary Update began rolling out less than a week ago, however, users have already taken to social media en masse to complain of issues related to the update causing freezing problems across the board, with there seemingly being no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem.
As noticed by Neowin, a thread on Reddit has gained huge traction after a user reported an issue with their PC freezing, particularly with the taskbar, and was looking for a solution. Turns out, many more users are experiencing the same or similar issues since the Anniversary Update. Users began trying to diagnose the issue, everything from software to hardware, to determine the root cause of the issues – so far, there’s no consensus on what causes it; in fact, users with vastly different hardware and software configurations are facing the same or similar problems.
Some solutions that have helped a few users – but not all, are as follows:
regedit tweak
moving app install location to system drive
installing/updating Intel Rapid Storage Technology
Unfortunately again, these solutions don’t work for everyone.
The issue appears to stem from the Start Menu and Taskbar, with the user outlining the process of when the freezing begins:
After logging in everything works for like 20secs. After that if I only mouse over the Start area, taskbar, the black part simply, it freezes and I get a message that Microsoft Windows is not responding. After a couple of ninja startups and restarts I disabled every 3rd party program starting with windows. So it’s not that.
At WinBeta, we’ve noticed similar issues. After logging in to an account, be it a local account or a Microsoft Account, the Start Menu and Taskbar are frozen for quite some time before they can be used; in some cases, the Start Menu and Taskbar freeze indefinitely and even restarting explorer.exe does not resolve the issue. This issue is apparent across different devices and hardware configurations.
Microsoft has not yet responded to the issues reported.
