Microsoft says November security updates cause printing issues

Microsoft warned customers earlier this week that November 2026 security updates could disrupt printing of complexly formatted documents.

As the company explains in a service alert seen by BleepingComputer, this known issue affects users who attempt to print documents with images that have zero height or width on both server (Windows Server 2016 or later) and client (Windows 10 or later) devices.

“After you install the November 2026 Windows Security Update (the original KBs listed above) or later updates, printing may fail for documents containing images rendered with a height or width value of zero at the selected print resolution,” Microsoft said.

“These images can be used as part of some complex document formats, such as adding “invisible” images to serve as document watermarks, layout anchors, or generation tools to insert image objects even when no graphics exist.”

The bug primarily affects users who print Microsoft Word documents through the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI), but it can also trigger failures when printing from other applications.

Microsoft also fixed printing issues triggered by Windows updates in March and July 2025: the first caused USB printers to print random text and the second broke the “Print to PDF” feature.

Most recently, the company informed customers that the August 2026 .NET Framework cumulative updates broke printing and exporting to PDF in applications that use the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) user interface framework.

This week, Microsoft also confirmed that security updates from this month’s Patch Tuesday trigger Windows activation and licensing failures with error codes 0x80041008 and that Windows updates released since October’s Patch Tuesday cause SQL Server performance and stability issues.

Additionally, the company warned that Windows 11 November 2026 security updates were failing to install on systems with the October 2026 preview update.