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Taskbar issues after Installing KB5003637 update

disable-news-interests

News and Interests in one column view

The monthly updates for June 2021 for Windows 10 were released on 8th June. For the supported releases version 2004, version 20H2, and version 21H1, KB5003637 was made available that includes security updates, plus a notable News and Interests widget in the taskbar for all. You can read it more here about that. As usual, there is a small subset of users who encounter issues with updates, and KB5003637 is no different.

KB5003637 causes taskbar glitches including Search bar turning white

Ever since the optional update KB5003214 was released at the end of May, I started seeing reports of taskbar issues specifically revolving around version 21H1. But it seems like the problem after Patch Tuesday is affecting all of the consumer-supported releases. The forum is full of reports like this.

Disabling “News and Interests” causes entire notification area to go blank (microsoft.com)

System tray / notification area disappeared post-update; can be restored; disappears again if Outlook is opened. (microsoft.com)

What’s wrong with the Windows Searchbar (microsoft.com)

The most common symptom was System icons entirely missing, or garbled like this.

System icons tray missing
System icons garbled

Upon some digging around threads around that time, I see that the changes made to introduce News and Interests widget is behind this behavior. For some people, disabling it has helped, for some enabling the same.

Fix Taskbar problems with KB5003637

Courtesy TRSmith3, a user on the Microsoft Community, the symptoms are as under, which in my tests are correct as well.

So if you change any of these scenarios, the problem would be resolved. As changing the scaling is not possible, toggling the News and Interests feature may help. If not, you can consider uninstalling KB5003637 and pause the updates for 7 days. Additionally, you can try switching to Dark Mode in Windows 10 Personalization Settings.

To uninstall this update, execute the steps below:

These steps can help you resolve the taskbar issues after KB5003637. Also do not forget to file Feedback in the Hub so that Microsoft Engineers can fix the problem.

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