For most here, I don't think this article contains new information.

The actual interesting discussion, to me, is why Microsoft won't show WHO is dangling the handle open when the user tries to interact with a file via Windows' UI. To understand that, we have to look at a BSOD change Microsoft made in Windows 8:

In Windows 2K, XP, Vista, and 7 the BSOD would tell you exactly WHO was causing your BSOD (i.e. which module). Which was incredibly helpful, when you could see it was a e.g. Creative sound driver, or Nvidia graphics driver. Then in Windows 8/8.1 they went to the "sad face" simplified BSOD screen. From then on in order to see which module it originated in, you had to load the mini-dump into WinDbg (which almost no users would/could do).

What I am saying is: Microsoft went out of their way to shield their partners (OEMs/hardware vendors) from criticism with that BSOD UI change. So it seems unlikely they'd make a change to the "File Locked" UI that would essentially do the same thing: Open up their partners to criticism for their [bad] software (e.g. anti-virus/anti-malware/corporate compliance/etc).

Then tack on that Microsoft's own software may be some misbehaving software; and they'd essentially be telling on themselves. OneDrive in particular, I've seen in that list a lot (but I could write paragraphs on what a turd/abandonware OneDrive is).

"Microsoft Reveals" articles on this site are clickbaity. All this information lives in public docs, and is well known in the industry.

It is cool that Microsoft is writing these blog posts for laypeople, though. And yes, kind of crazy that some of these rough edges in the OS have not been smoothed out yet.

But the offending module is not necessarily the module listed in the BSOD. It could be a victim too, one that got its memory corrupted by someone else.

That's one reason why they removed it, because it was causing end users to blame vendors/MS when they often had nothing to do with whatever the problem was.

That’s a reasonable explanation. It would be so easy for them to show the offending application rather than the user closing all applications and it’s still locked and then having to restart Windows.

I believe it was removed actually because it's not a strong indicator of the real fault, there was an old article on this but could only find this more recent summary https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250121-00/?p=11...