November Windows updates: printing fails on zero-size images

Call: Known issue. Microsoft has a notice in its admin-center release health saying that after November’s updates, “printing might fail for documents with images that have zero height or width.” We can’t link it for you. It’s only in the signed-in Microsoft 365 admin center, not on any public release-health page or KB article we could open on the morning of Nov 12. Two admins in the r/sysadmin Patch Tuesday megathread posted the notice text, issue IDs WI1549472 through WI1549482 and status “Confirmed.” Treat it as Microsoft-acknowledged but not yet public. On Nov 13, BleepingComputer (opens in a new tab) reported the same service alert, so it’s no longer just a forum relay. Keep deploying, and tell the help desk what to look for.

What breaks: Going by the relayed notice, printing fails for documents that contain an image with zero height or zero width. Microsoft says it saw this when printing Word documents through GDI, but other apps can hit it too. BleepingComputer quotes Microsoft explaining where these images come from: “invisible” images used as watermarks, for layout anchoring, or inserted by document-generation tools even when there’s no graphic. The alert covers Windows 10 and later and Windows Server 2016 and later. Microsoft’s next step is “investigating.” No fix or workaround is published.

Who’s hit: The relayed notice lists every November cumulative update as the originating update: KB5132061 (Windows 11 24H2/25H2/26H2), KB5132059 (26H1), KB5131087 (23H2), KB5131096 (Windows 10 21H2/22H2), KB5131085 (LTSC 2019 and Server 2019), KB5131291 (LTSC 2016 and Server 2016), KB5131080 (Server 2025) and KB5131090 (Server 2022). Most documents won’t have a zero-size image in them, so expect this to show up as one particular document or template that won’t print, not as printing failing everywhere.

Workaround: Microsoft hasn’t published one. If a specific document won’t print, look for hidden or zero-size images in it (Word’s Selection Pane is the quick way to find them), delete them or give them a real size, and try again. Don’t uninstall November over this unless printing a particular document is business-critical.

We’ll update this when the notice appears on a public Microsoft page or Microsoft ships a fix.

Sources: BleepingComputer (opens in a new tab), r/sysadmin November megathread (opens in a new tab) (where the admin-center notice was relayed).

November Windows updates: printing fails on zero-size images

Sources

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