Fixing disappearing shortcuts in Windows Start menu does not bring them back

On Friday, Microsoft announced that an update that was supposed to fix a Windows problem with application shortcuts disappearing from the Start menu or taskbar has been fully deployed. But a few days ago, IT administrators described a similar problem on Twitter and Reddit, and Microsoft confirmed that it is related to the recent Microsoft Defender update.

Here's What We Know

The problem mainly affects companies and organizations that use Microsoft 365 and Defender to protect against malware or other threats. In customer support, Microsoft said that the problem is caused by a specific attack surface reduction rule. Earlier in the day, IT administrators tried to resolve the issue by setting the "Block Win32 API calls from Office macro" rule to audit only.

Microsoft says it has "reverted the rule to prevent further impact while we conduct further investigation." It took several hours before Microsoft announced the full rollout of the fix at 4:46 p.m. Eastern Time.

The bad news is that the fix does not restore deleted shortcuts, as described in Microsoft's details of the problem. The problem affects thousands of computers in various organizations and it has caused a lot of trouble for system administrators.

Regular Windows users and consumers are not affected by this strange bug and it will only affect managed machines within organizations.

Source: Windows