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

Products

• VMware vCenter Server
• VMware Cloud Director

Issue/Introduction

After deploying and customizing a Windows 11 24H2/25H2 VM, user may encounter a black screen following the first boot.

This issue occurs after sysprep and generalization when the Windows VM is powered on and after guest OS customization completes successfully.

After login to the Windows VM as administrator, explorer.exe has crashed and the desktop never loads. However, domain users are unaffected.

 

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 9.0.0
VMware vCloud Director 10.6.x

Cause

This issue stems from a change in the supported account types for Sysprep operations. explorer.exe may crash unexpectedly due to AppX package dependencies failing to initialize after Sysprep.

Resolution

Broadcom engineering is aware of the issue and is currently investigating. A fix is planned for a future build of VCF.

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;
  Start-Process explorer.exe
}"

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

Additional Information

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 an issue with sysprep and explorer.exe. Contact Microsoft Support if you have questions on the above workaround and the cause of this bug.