At this point, Windows users are probably now in a love hate relationship with their beloved OS and its creator, Microsoft. For every good that the company does with the OS, there’s a bad – and in most cases, the bad comes in the form of buggy updates.
A new security patch released for Windows 7,8 and 10 have been reported to cause freezes on startup – here we go again. This time however, the bug only happens if you have these third-party antiviruses installed – for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, Avira, Avast, Sophos and ArcaBit; while for Win 10, only ArcaBit causes the freezing.
Image credit: Avira
These issues were detailed in the respective OS’s update history pages; and credit to Microsoft for identifying the issue and are temporarily blocking the update on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 systems.
The updates causing the issue are the KB4493472 and KB4493448 on Windows 7, KB4493467 and KB4493446 on Windows 8.1, and KB4493509 on Windows 10. If you’ve installed these updates and are encountering the issue, boot your system into safe mode and uninstall the update.
By the way, here’s an excellent best free antivirus software that you might want to check out.