Rebooting/shutting down Windows takes a lot of time after KB5023778.

Hello everyone!

After the last Windows 11 update, namely KB5023778, I have been experiencing this strange issue - every single time I'm rebooting or turning off the system, it says that it's in the process of update and that I shouldn't turn the computer off. It seems to me, that the update has been installed without any problems.
The problems are, that:
1. The update was installed some time ago, and Windows should not show this prompt more than once after an update.
2. The reboot and shutting down takes enormous time, like an hour or even more.
3. Troubleshooting Windows Update shows only, that there are some updates pending reboot, but it's the only place I can find this info, as I'm not getting any prompt form the OS while working on it on everyday basis.

Any suggestions? Nothing I did so far seemed to help much.

Welcome to the forum. It sounds to me like its the same update failing over and over. Go to settings>system>windows update>update history and it should tell you the failing update.Try suggestions here, Windows 10 Keeps Installing Same Updates Over and Over [Fixed]

Hello glasskuter! Thank you for your warm welcome and for the reply.

Unfortunately none of the suggestions on the webpage you've linked seem to work in my case, although deleting Software Distribution folder initially did speed up the reboot process, but only temporarily.

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Please look at your update history. What update keeps trying to install and failing. If it's only KB5023778?

Try this.

Reset windows update components. Reset Windows Update in Windows 11 Tutorial

Go here and manually download that update. Microsoft Update Catalog

Disable all AV including Malwarebytes if you have it. (Defender is ok) Use task manager to make sure none of its processes are running.

Manually apply the update you downloaded and restart.

Let me know if it installed correctly.

Hi again.

Unfortunately it didn't help. First of all when I've run the .bat script it seemed that some operations failed, but eventually the script ended its work and restarted the computer. After that when I've tried to install the KB5023778 update, a prompt pumped up saying that this update is already installed, so no progress.

The result from Windows Update troubleshooter. First two lines state (my translation from Polish):
* search for a pending reboot operation
* check if there are issues with Windows Update