[nicholashead]

I had a weird issue the other day (two days ago?) too where trying to load Microsoft Store/check for updates would just completely freeze the program. And also my start menu would not execute apps - I could search for them and hit enter to run them - but nothing would happen.

I'm wondering if it was related to some of this. You're absolutely right that an OS should never "soft-lock" on cloud/networking issues. It's insane to me that we still deal with this as programmers in the year 2021. Write asynchronous code. Expect network slowness or weirdness.

[d2wa]

If I remember correctly, then your specific issue was supposedly fixed in one of the recent Insider builds.

Windows Search is heavily cloud-dependent, and yes it’s performance suffers under poor network conditions.