Microsoft is Quietly Retiring the Legacy Troubleshooters in Windows 11

Back in February, Microsoft quietly revealed that it would retire what it now calls the legacy inbox troubleshooters in Windows 11. I’m not sure why I never wrote about this, but I need to update the Windows 11 Field Guide to address this change, since Microsoft seems to be a bit ahead of schedule on this transition.

Anyway, let’s step through this and take a look at what has changed.

“Microsoft is retiring the Windows legacy inbox Troubleshooters, such as Keyboard troubleshooter and Speech troubleshooter, and the Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) that runs them,” a Microsoft support document from February notes. “The legacy inbox Windows Troubleshooters are built-in tools that, when launched, automatically diagnose and correct common problems for a variety of Windows features. MSDT Troubleshooters will be deprecated in the next Windows 11 release, with the date to be determined.”

The now-legacy inbox Troubleshooting platform debuted in 2009 with Windows 7. It’s a control panel that replaced the Help and Support troubleshooting tools from previous Windows versions, and it has carried forward in subsequent Windows versions largely unchanged, at least from a UI perspective. Though in Windows 11 today, you access this system through the Settings app, in System > Troubleshoot > Other troubleshooters.

Until fairly recently, most of the legacy troubleshooters were still available here. But testing this today, I can find only one instance in which the legacy troubleshooter appears, for Windows Update.

The rest of the troubleshooters found here are new and part of Windows 11’s Get Help app. For example:

Get Help is just a prettier front-end for this stuff, I guess. Plus, the Control Panel has been on the way out for far too long as it is.

But what’s interesting about this to me is that I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks, but most of the troubleshooters were still of the legacy variety. But when I looked at them this week, I could see that most had switched over. I tried this on multiple PCs, both 22H2 and 23H2 (Beta channel), and got the same results. Only when I brought up an out-of-date 22H2 virtual machine (VM) in Hyper-V did I see what I had seen before.

The transition schedule Microsoft published back in February hasn’t changed (thanks, Wayback Machine). But it appears that Microsoft is now well ahead of that schedule, which calls for it to begin redirecting some legacy troubleshooters to the new system in 2023, complete the transition in 2024 and then remove the rest of the troubleshooters, and then remove the underlying MSDT platform in 2025.

Based on those dates, I’d have guessed that the legacy troubleshooters would be deprecated in Windows 11 version 23H2 and then retired in Windows 11/12 version 24H2. But most of them are already deprecated now in version 22H2.

That said, you can still find the legacy versions of the troubleshooters (because they are deprecated, not removed) if you try hard enough. For example, to use the old Network and Internet troubleshooter, use troubleshoot network in Start search and then select “Find and fix network problems” from the results. Ditto for Audio troubleshooting (troubleshoot sound then “Find and fix problems with playing sound”), Printer troubleshooting (troubleshoot print then “Find and fix problems with printing”), and so on. I assume these results will all disappear alongside the legacy troubleshooters in Windows 11 version 24H2. Or before then, given the speed at which this has happened so far.

No matter. I will try to get the book updated this weekend.