Booting a customized Windows 11 24H2/25H2 or Windows Server 2025 virtual machine may be blocked by a black screen

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware Cloud Director VCF Operations/Automation (formerly VMware Aria Suite)

Issue/Introduction

After deploying a virtual machine (VM) from a template using a Guest OS Customization Specification, one or more of the following issues occur:

The VM fails to rename according to the specification.
VM customization fails to rename or join domain
This issue may occur after sysprep and generalization, when the Windows VM is powered on and after guest OS customization completes successfully.
IP addresses are not assigned to the network adapters.
The VM fails to join the Active Directory domain.
After login to the Windows VM as administrator, explorer.exe has crashed and the desktop never loads.
The user encounters a persistent black screen following the first boot after login.
Affected Windows Versions:
- Windows 11 24H2 builds newer than GA build 26100.1742
- Windows 11 25H2 GA build 26200.6584 and newer
- Windows Server 2025

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x
VMware vCenter Server 7.x
VMware vCenter 9.x
VMware vCloud Director 10.6.x
Aria Automation 8.18.x

Cause

This issue is caused by a change in Microsoft Sysprep behavior where operations are executed under the SYSTEM account. This prevents certain AppX package dependencies from initializing correctly.
Additionally, if the AppX Deployment Service (AppXSvc) is disabled in the gold image/template, Sysprep generalization halts, preventing customization tasks (rename, IP, domain join) from triggering.

Resolution

Broadcom engineering is aware of the issue and is currently investigating.

As a workaround, Microsoft has provided the following PowerShell commands to re-register the affected system apps after Windows black screen.

1. Launch the PowerShell by Task Manager and run:
  
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode
2. After registering the above Appx packages, re-launch Explorer.exe or reboot the Windows operating system. You should then be able to log in without encountering the black screen issue.
3. To automatically apply the workaround during customization, add the following content in RunOnce command of Windows customization specification:
  
  powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "& {
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode;
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.UI.Xaml.CBS_8wekyb3d8bbwe\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode;
  Add-AppxPackage -Register -Path 'C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\appxmanifest.xml' -DisableDevelopmentMode;
  shutdown -r -t 5 -f
  }"

Note: To open Task Manager when explorer is not running, you can use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Esc

Additional Information

If the April 14, 2026 update (KB5082063) is included in the OS build history, running 'Add-AppxPackage' via Customization Spec 'RunOnce' consistently fails.
- Create a new OS template using the latest build of Windows Server 2025 directly (or applying July 14, 2026 update KB5099536 directly), skipping the April 14, 2026 update (KB5082063)
Additional steps may be necessary to get the template to deploy VMs without experiencing this black screen. Some steps that have helped customers with this are below.
- Convert the template to a VM, power on the VM, power off the VM, convert the VM back to a template.

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Perform Windows Updates after the customization process is complete. This avoids compatibility and boot-time issues due to the update behavior changing pre-deployment system state. This is a known issue with Sysprep. For more details and the official workaround regarding this issue, refer to the Microsoft documentation: Fix black screen after running Sysprep as system on Windows 11 or Windows Server 2025