Microsoft blocks even more customization apps in Windows 11 version 24H2

> What happened is that we recently made changes to this internal function, and apparently those changes were enough to cause the patcher to go haywire. This is unfortunately a regular occurrence: Whenever a new build goes out, there’s a spike of Explorer crashes because all of these patchers start patching the wrong code, and Explorer starts crashing across all the systems that have these “shell enhancement” programs installed. If you’re really unlucky, their rogue patch crashes something in the Explorer startup path, and users finds themselves stuck with an unusable machine due to Explorer crash loops.

I'm all for blaming Microsoft for all the world's ills, but I'd be inclined to assume good faith on this one.

Clearly Microsoft has given up on powerusers, the people who notice and sometimes fix flaws in their monolith. Seems shortsighted.

> The interesting thing here was how the program decided where to install its patches, and in particular how it managed to patch an function that was never exported or stored in a vtable: It found the function by contacting the Microsoft symbol server to get the names of all the functions in Explorer and their addresses!

I don't think anyone would make a program do hacky binary patching like that just for fun. Presumably, they did it that way because Microsoft doesn't offer any reasonable way to accomplish the same functionality. If enough people used the hacky binary patch that it produced a noticeable spike in crashes, then I do blame Microsoft for making it necessary in the first place.