Windows 11 update nightmare continues with games and an antivirus app hit

 man in a suit gets angry and smashes the keyboard on the monitor
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Windows 11’s latest optional update is causing a bunch of problems for some users, including reported issues with games and conflicts with an antivirus app.

Let’s start with the apparent misfire in the works patch KB5025305 has visited upon gamers, going by claims on Reddit flagged up by Windows Latest.

One Reddit user reported having games freezing after installing the preview update, with the issue being resolved after uninstalling the patch, suggesting it was to blame. Another user chimed in saying they were having the same problem, and after troubleshooting for a few days, they concluded that KB5025305 was the root of their issues.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there have also been some reports of the update failing to install (that’s definitely nothing new).

Another reported flaw with April’s preview update for Windows 11 is a warning that pops up with Kaspersky antivirus, saying that: “There may be some future limitations when running on this version of Microsoft Windows 11.”

Windows Latest points out that a Kaspersky engineer has confirmed that KB5025305 is causing this mysterious message to appear. It’s not clear what it actually means for the antivirus, but you should only see the message once, we’re told.

One user suggests that the problem may be with Kaspersky’s firewall, observing that the Windows 11 update modifies firewall settings.

In the Kaspersky forum post where the engineer replies, other users are talking about their Windows 11 systems running more slowly after the update (for example, experiencing jitters when moving the mouse around the desktop).


Analysis: Microsoft better get on the case...

We’ll just have to see what happens as a result of Kaspersky’s investigation into the antivirus bug, because at the time of writing, no conclusion has been drawn. And clearly, the guess about the firewall being wonky is just that – a guess.

There’s no actual evidence to suggest that, but folks running Kaspersky are rightly worried about what might have gone awry to cause this error message. (And whether that might leave them somehow vulnerable on the security front – with Kaspersky yet to elaborate on the problem, we just don’t know).

As for the apparent bug where games are running slower or freezing due to KB5025305, at the moment, there are just a couple of scattered reports, so we can’t put too much stock in those. It wouldn’t be the first time an update has accidentally caused frame rate drops, though.

Still, this remains one to watch, rather than a big worry at the moment. We’ll see if further reports pop up between now and the release of KB5025305 to everyone running Windows 11.

This optional update becomes a full release next week, so Microsoft and Kaspersky will definitely need to iron out that other gremlin between them, as that’s an antivirus product used by a lot of people.

As yet, though, these problems have not appeared in Microsoft’s support document listing the known issues for KB5025305, which is a slight worry in itself, certainly with the Kaspersky glitch. We’d have thought that would have been picked up on and mentioned by now, but it’s a possibility that Microsoft is looking into it on the quiet. We shall see.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).