- Patch KB5048239 for Windows 10 was first deployed in November 2024
- It’s now been installed again as part of Microsoft’s patching for January 2025
- However, this update is reportedly installing itself over and over again, and for quite a number of Windows 10 users it seems
Ever had a Windows 10 (or Windows 11) update that failed to install? That’s a problem I’ve noticed happens relatively often, but a new twist on misfiring updates is a patch that keeps on installing itself, despite being successfully installed in the past.
This is what's apparently happening with Windows 10, and the update in question is patch KB5048239, as Neowin reports.
It’s useful to cover the backstory here, which is that KB5048239 was pushed out to Windows 10 PCs (on 21H2 and 22H2) in November 2024 (among other patches), as a cure for problems with the WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) which themselves have a lengthy history.
However, last year, KB5048239 failed to install for some people due to them not having enough space in their Windows 10 recovery partition (a minimum of 250MB is necessary).
Microsoft then issued a bunch of advice to affected users and tried to smooth out the update, but it seems that Windows 10 is now trying to deliver KB5048239 again. And again… and again… and (you get the idea).
Dean Wortmier tells us on Microsoft’s help forum, Answer’s.com, that: “This particular update installed successfully for me in November 2024, and is trying to install again today -- over and over and over... -- each time ‘successfully.’”
Another complaint comes from Brian Lofthouse: “Hi to you all. I checked my updates this morning and KB5048239 was waiting to be installed again! I run the troubleshooter and it installed again, I checked ‘View updates’ and it had changed the date from yesterday to today! It is like a Merry-go-round. I can feel a migraine coming on!”
Those two threads have had 353 people click that they ‘have the same question’ to give you an idea of the scale of the impact here (at the time of writing). So, this appears to be an issue affecting a fair few folks running Windows 10.
Is there any way out of this mess?
As to a resolution for the ‘little update that wouldn’t give up,’ the not-so-great news is that there doesn’t appear to be one.
Whatever people are trying to do, such as removing the older version of this update before letting the newest one for January 2025 install, doesn’t make any difference. They are still getting KB5048239 installing over and over. Even those whose WinRE setup is fine (and the partition is large enough) are still being hit by this debacle, as noted on this thread over at the Ask Woody forums.
Does having this patch installed over and over actually matter, though? Will it detrimentally affect your system? Probably not, but even if this isn’t throwing small spanners into the Windows 10 works somewhere, it’s still annoying to see the same update getting downloaded and installed repeatedly. Those who don’t know what’s going on here may assume their PC has some kind of serious bug – or even virus – and maybe waste a fair bit of time trying to diagnose and fathom what’s going on.
Hopefully Microsoft will have an announcement coming, and I’ve reached out to the company to find out (I’ll update this story with any response).
For now, though, about all you can do is grin and bear it (or frown and bear it, more like). One option is to pause Windows 10 updates for as long as you can (with the side effect that you won’t get other updates, of course – which might be bad news in itself). Otherwise, it’s just a matter of waiting for Microsoft to fix this (we've contacted the company for comment), which hopefully will happen fairly soon considering that this is a problem plaguing a non-trivial number of Windows 10 users, from what I can tell.
