Build: 26200.9457 (25H2)

Since the smaller taskbar buttons came back, the complaints about them read like a long list: a battery icon smaller than the percentage next to it, an input indicator (ENG US) that looks oversized, a search box that doesn't match its neighbours, app icons that look soft. This came up in a thread on r/Windows11 last week, and the more symptoms people added, the clearer it got that it's two problems with two different causes, not five.

1. The text doesn't follow the bar

The small taskbar shrinks the icons and leaves the text alone. The battery percentage, the input indicator, the clock and the date, the search box label: all of them take their size from the system font metrics, which follow your display scaling and have no idea the bar got shorter. The icons come down, the text next to them stays where it was.

Wi-Fi, volume and battery belong here too, even though they look like icons. They're glyphs from an icon font (Segoe Fluent Icons), not bitmaps, so they render sharp at any size. When one of them looks off, it's off in size relative to its own text. It's never blurry.

2. App icons taken at the wrong size

App icons are the other path. They come from the .ico inside each program, which is a fixed set of bitmaps at specific sizes. At the normal bar height the standard small size fits exactly. The short bar wants a size somewhere in between, and when the app's icon doesn't include one, a larger image gets scaled down. That's the softness.

It also explains why some apps look crisp and others don't: the ones that ship more sizes in their .ico come out clean. The apps aren't doing anything wrong. The fix belongs to the shell, which could load the icon from the app's icon group at the size the bar needs (LoadIconWithScaleDown exists for exactly this) instead of resizing one it already has.

The quick test

Blurry: it's the icon one.

Sharp, but the wrong size next to its own text: it's the metrics one.

If you want to report it

The icon half is already in Feedback Hub. u/Tringi filed it over a year ago, so search for it and upvote it rather than filing a new one. Votes piled on one item count for more than the same votes spread over five.

The text half, as far as I know, has never been filed as a single item. If you report it, put every symptom you see inside that one report instead of opening one per icon.

Has anyone found a symptom that doesn't fit either of the two?

I haven't seen a news article about this yet, but KB5074109 makes it impossible to launch an AVD remote desktop connection from a Windows 11 25H2 device. I installed this update today and it broke AVD. Uninstalling the update immediately resolved the issue. Just wanted to share it with others to hopefully save people some time.

I've started noticing this problem around v1803 or might be earlier. spending a few days without restarting PC leads windows explorer to start goring. Icon thumbnails start to disappear and be replaced by generic icons (generic "picture" icon for a picture and generic "folder" icon for a folder...etc). on top of that loading directories becomes slow while trying to access and shows the green loading bar on top. and on top of that it starts crashing more frequently. today I tried deleting a file but the process never completes.

I thought that this might be a windows explorer issues again so I tried removing with 'remove-item' powershell command but that too got stuck. so I see it's not just windows explorer being buggy at this point. also I've noticed that it became worse by jumping from v1809 to v1903. all it takes is 2 to 3 days without restarting. sometimes it would break within hours. I believe this problem starts while messing with media files (pictures and music).

reinstalling OS does not resolve the issue. I do NOT have issues with any of my disks.

any tips to repair this mess?

Windows 10 v1903 X86_64 + latest patches

feedback hub link: https://aka.ms/AA6e76i

I was experiencing some issues with PC for sometimes, today I got new hard drive for it. So I thought to reset PC after installing the drive.

After resetting windows (keeping personal files) I tried to download some softwares using edge which should be installed by default.

I found it was available to download from Microsoft Store. I don't know if it's a new feature or a bug. I wasn't worried because I had a standalone installation file of chrome in old drive.