In early 2023, Microsoft shipped monthly updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11 that introduced a subtle but destructive bug: copying files from a Video CD through Windows Explorer can freeze the copy operation, corrupt the Explorer shell, and leave the system in a state that requires a hard power-cycle to recover. The bug was identified and reported through Microsoft's Feedback Hub at the end of 2025. Nothing has happened since — no acknowledgment, no confirmation, no fix. The technical root is that Video CDs are not standard ISO 9660 data discs, despite appearing as such in Explorer. The .DAT files visible on a mounted VCD are not real files — they are "ISO gateways," a construct that lets Windows emulate raw track reading within its filesystem driver. Linux doesn't even expose these files for regular copying. Windows historically papered over this with its iso9660 driver, allowing users to drag-and-drop VCD content as if it were ordinary data. Something in the 2023-03 update (KB5023706 for Win11) and 2023-04 update (KB5025221 for Win10) changed the behavior of that emulation layer. The failure mode is severe relative to the trigger. When the bug fires, Explorer's copy speed drops to zero and stays there. Closing the copy dialog doesn't recover the system: new files and folders become invisible without manual refresh, UI elements glitch, and the Explorer process cannot be restarted cleanly. A soft restart from Windows hangs indefinitely at the "Restarting" screen. Only a hard reboot via the physical power or reset button restores the system. This is not a cosmetic glitch — it is a shell-level corruption that renders the OS unusable. The bug is intermittent but reproducible across different systems, including clean Windows installations. It can be triggered with physical CDs or virtual drives (mounted via Alcohol 120%), though physical media is more reliable, likely because longer copy times give the fault more opportunity to surface. Critically, the bug is specific to Explorer's copy mechanism: playing VCD content with Windows Media Player, extracting with VCDGear, or copying with third-party tools like FastCopy or TeraCopy does not trigger it. Total Commander does trigger it, because it defaults to Windows' standard copy API. The initial Windows 10 and Windows 11 22H2 releases without updates do not exhibit this bug, which pins the regression cleanly to the 2023 update cycle. The reporter used VMware Workstation to systematically isolate the conditions, testing across clean installs, different media types, and multiple copy methods. The methodology is solid for an individual bug report — this is not a vague complaint but a well-documented regression with specific KB numbers, reproduction steps, and environmental controls. Microsoft's silence is the structural story here. The Feedback Hub is nominally the channel for this kind of report, but it functions more as a suggestion box than a triage system. A bug that can hard-lock a Windows installation should, by any reasonable quality standard, receive at least an acknowledgment. The VCD use case is admittedly niche in 2025 — but the failure mode (shell corruption requiring hard reboot) is not niche. If the iso9660 driver emulation layer is unstable, the correct response is either to fix it or to stop exposing VCD files as copyable objects in Explorer. Doing neither is a choice to leave a known system-stability hazard in production. The broader pattern is familiar: Microsoft's update infrastructure ships regressions into edge-case hardware and media interactions, and the feedback loop for non-enterprise users is effectively broken. Individual reporters do careful diagnostic work, file through official channels, and hear nothing. The cost is borne entirely by users who encounter the bug, while Microsoft faces no consequence for ignoring it. For a company that controls the operating system running on over a billion devices, the inability to triage a documented shell-corruption bug in two years is not a resource problem — it is a priorities problem.
