Microsoft Merges Skip Ahead and Fast Ring, releases Build 17661

In case if anyone missed, Microsoft has already released Build 1803 to public on 30^th April and it was that phase now where Fast ring is divided into two parts, skip Ahead and production Fast ring. It was quite expected that the next Skip Ahead Build would merge both of the parts to one, and it has happened with Build 17661 released yesterday.

Microsoft has already shipped a number of Fast ring Builds of Redstone 5, which ships new features, the prominent one being Sets. More improvements are there with this Build 17661 which are:

• New and Modern snipping experience
  • New Screen sketch named application
  • Easy snipping with Win+Shift+S
• Acrylic Task View
• Windows Defender is renamed to Windows Security
• More sound Settings Migration to Settings app.
• Improvements to Chinese IME
• Improved HEIC Support

Improvements

Here are the improvements with Build 17661:

• Made a number of improvements to how Narrator communicates the use of Sets – for example, Narrator will now inform you of the tabs by reading information such as Tab # N of M as you open and move between tabs. If you’re a Narrator user, please take a moment to try out Sets with today’s build and share feedback about the experience.
• When you clean install or do a PC refresh, you’ll find that the Out of Box Experience for setting up your PC now includes a page for enabling activity history sync, which will help you continue what you were doing, even when you switch devices.
• Adjusted how you access skin tones in the Emoji Panel – you’ll now see a row of skin tone colors to select from when people emoji are in view.
• Fixed an issue where using arrow and Page Up / Page Down keys didn’t work to scroll webpages in Microsoft Edge.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the mouse cursor becoming invisible when hovering over certain UI elements and text fields in the last two flights.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the mouse cursor not animating correctly in the last two flights.
• Fixed an issue resulting in the Game Bar not appearing for some Insiders after pressing WIN+G.
• When you hover over the Windows icon in the taskbar, a tooltip will now appear for Start.
• Updated the design of the handwriting panel so that the delete button is now a top level button. The button to switch languages is now under the “…” menu.
• If you go to Pen & Windows Ink Settings, you’ll find a new option that allows your pen to behave like a mouse instead of scrolling or panning the screen.

Known issues

The known issues with Build 17661 are:

• Certain notifications from Action Center may cause regular Explorer.exe crashes. We’re working to get this fixed in the next flight.
• VPN may not be working after updating to this build. To get VPN working again, delete the %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Network\Connections\pbk* directories. Check if the VPN profile you need shows up already and if not, reinstall the appropriate VPN client app you need.
• After updating to this build and installing the latest app updates from the Microsoft Store, when you log in to additional user accounts on the PC there may be missing apps. You can run the following PowerShell script when logged in to users with missing apps on your PC to fix the issue: Get-AppXPackage *WindowsStore* -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}
• On resuming from sleep, the desktop may be momentarily visible before the Lock screen displays as expected.
• When Movies & TV user denies access to its videos library (through the “Let Movies & TV access your videos library?” popup window or through Windows privacy settings), Movies & TV crashes when the user navigates to the “Personal” tab.
• We’re aware of an issue that causes Narrator to read extra text when invoking Alt + Tab, and we’re working on a fix.
• If you complete the setup for a Windows Mixed Reality headset on this build, the headset will remain black until it is unplugged and reconnected to the PC.
• [ADDED] If your PC appears stuck at “Preparing to install…” somewhere between the 80%-100% – please be patient and wait up to 30 minutes for this stage to complete.

Build 17661 would always be available via Windows update.