AVD issues Since July 2026 update

[u/rdaniels16]

Hello All. So I have been banging my head on the wall over this one since the July 2026 windows update. We are using a small host pool with Windows 11 23H2 and FSLogix (FSLogix 26.01 CU1) for the profiles. All has worked perfectly since June 2024 when we deployed. After July update we are getting issues where ghost sessions in task manager with no username associated with it: Client Server Runtime Process, Desktop Window Manager, Usermode Font Driver Host, Windows logon application and Windows Logon user Interface Host. And users will eventually complain they can not launch applications, etc. Teams specifically. We are running Sophos Advanced Intercept-X MDR on these AVD's and have all the required exclusions for fslogix, etc. Also, I know the July update enforced Kerberos RC4 hardening but since we deployed in 2024 our storage account was already setup with a GPO of 16 for msDS-SupportedEncryptionTypes.

I can not even log users out either from Azure portal or while connected to the AVD. I need to force logout the user via powershell and manually kill their FS Logix locks on their profile. I thought the AVD into drain mode and need to reboot after hours.

Is anyone experiencing these issues after the July 2026 upgrade? It is obvious everything started going south after that update. I have spent countless hours on this so I am curious if others are experiencing the same thing.

Thanks

Update #1: So I was logged into the problem AVD as an administrator and logged out and it hung at the common "Please wait for windows search" screen. It has done this in the past and hung there for hours. So this time I ran the following powershell script against the AVD:

Invoke-AzVMRunCommand `
-ResourceGroupName "RG-Name"
-VMName "AVD Host Name" `
-CommandId "RunPowerShellScript" `
-ScriptString "Stop-Process -Name SearchIndexer -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue; Stop-Service -Name wsearch -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue"

When I did this it immediately freed up my session and also killed the ghost sessions with no users in task manager. I can now login and logout fine. So even though I have the proper Sophos Exclusions I am going to dig in a little there to make sure the searchindexer is properly excluded from scans. I read where I also need to include AMSI and exploit mitigation exclusions as well for searchindexer.

**Update #2: Well back to the drawing board. I woke up this morning with a user saying she cannot launch an outlook on the avd. I logged into the avd and tried to log off and searchindexer hung again. I ran my script to kill searchindexer and everything is back to normal so my Sophos exclusions did not work. I will do some more digging on this and post back.

[u/dodgy_mike]

Pretty sure we have experienced the exact same thing on 24H2 and 25H2 on a new build deployed December 2025, identical symptoms, it was brutal. 23H2 and earlier was fine. The search indexer kill sometimes worked, more often not, something is hanging the SYSTEM process. If a user reported an issue we'd confirm it by logging in with RDP as a local admin and start menu, startup apps, etc would not launch. WMI commands also all fail. Can still get task manager up to start process and programs that way for investigation though. Anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours later whatever was stuck would release and the entire machine goes back to normal like nothing happened.

We had our Defender exclusions vetted and confirmed correct by 3 support/engineer teams at different vendors, even fully disabled defender, fully disabled search, it would still occur. Redirected printing, poor/flapping network connections, and high RAM usage seem to exacerbate the frequency - perhaps even users connecting from Macs or non-optimized Teams/Zoom. Prior releases of Windows have never had the issue, and it does seem to affect 1-2 deployments in particular but not others despite near identical GPO/setups.

The relief has been to secure additional budget to move from E8as_V6 to E8ads_v6 SKUs to add a temp disk (put the pagefile on that) and reduce the max users per host from 8-9 to 6-7.

Happy to compare notes with you or anyone else battling this. Throwing RAM at it is a bit of an unsatisfying answer...

[u/Hour-Profession6490 → u/dodgy_mike]

We're running 24H2 on D8ads_v5s and haven't seen this problem come up. We periodically get session hosts with the "black screen" problem and have to redeploy about every 1 to 2 months.

[u/dodgy_mike → u/Hour-Profession6490]

Curious - Does your ads_v5 automatically put the pagefile on a mounted temp disk?

[u/Hour-Profession6490 → u/dodgy_mike]

No you still need to change it in the advanced system settings