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

Products

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

Issue/Introduction

• After deploying and customizing a Windows 11 24H2/25H2 or Windows Server 2025 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
• Aria Automation 8.18.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. 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

1. 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) is required.
2. 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