Forum Discussion
Windows 11 24H2 Broadcast Storm?
Hello,
Since about mid-December, I've been experiencing multiple workstation broadcast storms from PCs. Didn't know it was that at first. What we experienced were random Epson kitchen printers dropping offline and not responding, and also some door controllers doing the same. After scanning network traffic, we notice a few PCs completely flooding the network with broadcast traffic. What happens after the 24H2 Update and continued updates since, is the Windows 11 PC starts broadcasting and doesn't stop on many ports. I found a reddit post about the Print Dialog box on browsers changing with this update and found a registry entry to add, which seems to take care of it after a reboot of the specific workstations broadcasting continuously. Trouble is, after we put the registry entry on a PC, sometimes it does start broadcasting again, and checking the registry entry, it has disappeared, and will need to be applied again.
Here is the key that we are adding manually at this time, until we figure out if this is actually a fix or not:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Print\UnifiedPrintDialog]
"PreferLegacyPrintDialog"=dword:00000001
Has anyone experienced these symptoms or something similar since December? This worries me, because we started moving the rest of our PCs to 11 24H2 so we are off 10 before October 2025. If this registry fix does work, I'd like to know how to deploy it to the whole domain, including the HKEY_CURRENT_USER location, and to apply it to any new profiles created across all workstations in the domain. If I added this key to the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE the same way, would this apply it to new users?
Placing your registry key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE under a similar path (such as HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Print\UnifiedPrintDialog) may prevent the issue for new users as it sets the default for all user profiles. However, you should be cautious with HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE keys regarding user-specific settings. The HKCU settings override the HKLM settings for specific users.
