Reply to post:

Yeah, this is why I stuck on Windows 8.1 (which gives me a few years before upgrade yet!) and don't automatically install any updates.

Sorry, Microsoft, but if even 1% of computers fail your update with errors like "you can't map network drives", then that update isn't going to get applied. Simple as that. I'm not running around 1% of my machines diagnosing mystery issues that won't get fixed until next year.

Have you not learned the lesson yet?

Monolithic updates are bad.

Updates which affect thousand upon thousands of unrelated files are bad.

Untested updates are bad.

Forced updates are bad.

If you'd broken this out into lots of small patches, you could have a) not affected your bandwidth but let users download it piecemeal, b) isolate individual fixes into individual updates with almost no difference on the back end, c) allowed power users and your own testers (laugh) to isolate which parts of the updates are failing easily, d) let your users download all the ones that aren't broken and revoke just those that are, e) seen interactions such as update X only goes wrong when also applied with update Y and saved everyone a lot of time, f) let users isolate using binary-search and remove individual updates that happen to cause them problems even if you don't care a jot about doing that yourself.

I really hope you continue to work like this, break so many critical updates, and get one of those "Whoops, you updated now and it's broke and there's nothing we can do" scenarios that you can just step back from, and start breaking people's machine irreversibly, so that you're made to stop with the forced updates. If you could manage that before 8.1 comes out of extended support, I'd be so happy.