Why Windows Update Reboots Instead of Shutting Down – and How to Fix the Stubborn Task Manager Bug

When you click “Update and shut down” on Windows 10 or Windows 11, the system sometimes fails to power off and instead restarts, leaving you at the login screen. The root cause is that the shutdown command is overridden by the update’s forced reboot mechanism.

Microsoft addressed this problem in the October cumulative update KB5067036 , which primarily targets Win11 24H2 and 25H2 users. The update fixes the unexpected reboot behavior for many users, but it also introduced a new issue.

The new bug makes the Task Manager behave like a “performance killer”: after closing it, the process continues running in the background, and reopening Task Manager spawns additional processes. This can quickly consume 20‑25 MB per instance, leading to 500 + instances and exhausting 10 GB of RAM, causing system lag and frame drops in games.

To stop the runaway Task Manager processes, you can manually terminate them with the command: taskkill /im taskmgr.exe /f If many instances are already running, use an elevated Command Prompt to execute the same command.

For a more thorough fix, reset the Windows Update components using PowerShell (run as administrator) with the following commands:

net stop wuauserv</code><code>net stop cryptSvc</code><code>net stop bits</code><code>ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old</code><code>ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 Catroot2.old</code><code>net start wuauserv</code><code>net start cryptSvc</code><code>net start bits</code><code>netsh winsock reset

After running these commands, restart your computer.

Another lingering issue is the driver installation error 0x80070103 , which occurs when Windows mistakenly installs an older or incompatible driver. Although the recent update mitigates its frequency, the problem is not fully resolved.

Overall, Microsoft has started to address long‑standing bugs in Windows 10 and Windows 11, but users still need to apply the above fixes to fully restore normal shutdown behavior and prevent Task Manager from hogging system resources.