Known Issue Rollback: Helping you keep Windows devices protected and productive

Thanks for your questions mfessler.

As we’ve already outlined in the blog, we sometimes share Group Policies intended for Enterprises in the Known Issue Activation KB article associated with a rollback. These Group Policy objects can be used to configure/control rollbacks; that said, at present we don’t have a consumer-centric solution for configuring or enumerating rollbacks.

There is no technical overview of KIR ID’s being made available either; these ID’s are implementation details and aren’t part of the publicly available information. In the future, we may change the implementation approach to use something else besides the ID’s, change the way the ID’s are used and so on – and if we ever make such changes, we’ll ensure that published Group Policies remain in working order. As a general approach we don’t have plans to go into the details of these ID’s at present.  

When Windows Update (WU) is disabled, machines would indeed stop receiving Known Issue Rollbacks. Telemetry is an entirely https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/configure-windows-diagnostic-data-in-your-organization that only affects whether Windows sends telemetry to Microsoft or not; when a machine is configured to disable telemetry from being sent to Microsoft, then we won’t receive any telemetry related to rollbacks either. That said, such machines would continue receiving (or not receiving) Known Issue Rollbacks depending on whether WU is enabled on those machines (or not).

For the rollbacks to be meaningful, the rollback-metadata must be interpreted in the context of a system that has installed the corresponding (problematic) Update. If a system doesn’t have the corresponding update, the rollback-metadata is benign does nothing further. OTOH if a machine acquires the affected Update (either through WU or some other channel) after the rollback-metadata has been obtained, the rollback will go into effect as soon as the corresponding Update is installed.

The Group Policies we supply with rollbacks also work the same way; machines without the corresponding Update can be pre-configured with the Group Policy if administrators would prefer to do so, and the rollback itself would go into effect as soon as the corresponding Update appears on the systems.

Can you clarify your question about “AllowExperimentation” - what setting is this question about?

Hope this helps!