Starting with Windows 11 25H2 Build 26200.7019 (or 26100.7019 on 24H2) and later, your PC will eventually shut down when you explicitly choose “Update and close.”
If your PC restarts after “Refresh and Shutdown”, you are not alone. It affects Windows 11 and 10 and is one of the most reported problems. Microsoft shipped a broken “Refresh and Shut Down” switch with Windows 10, and never acknowledged it until now.
I don’t want to remember the countless times I’ve been fooled with “Refresh and Shut Down”. When it’s 11pm and I have to go to work the next morning, but there’s a Windows update pending. I would select Update and closeand I would go to bed, but the next morning, Windows would be on the login screen if the battery didn’t die.
Because those update options are next to each other, you can assume that you press “Refresh and restart” instead of “Refresh and shutdown”, which would explain the return to the login screen. But no, it was always a Windows bug and you’re not alone if you can’t trust the “Refresh and Shut Down” button.
We don’t know what actually causes “Refresh and Shutdown” to restart Windows. But Microsoft confirmed that the optional October 2025 update (KB5067036) finally fixed an underlying issue that prevented “Refresh and Shutdown” from working in some cases.
“Fixed an underlying issue that could cause ‘Update and Shutdown’ to not actually shut down your PC after updating,” Microsoft noted in a supporting document.
Why “Refresh and Shut Down” didn’t work in Windows 11 and Windows 10
Microsoft won’t tell us what actually happened, but there’s a chance it was a race condition or an issue with the Windows services stack.
When you use Update and shut down, Windows has two tasks to do. First, it will start installing all pending updates. Secondly, it will turn off the computer at the end of the process, but the problem is that the process is not just about “install the update and turn it off.”
Windows can’t skip a reboot just because you told it to shut down after the update. It should reboot into an offline service phase, which is when you see “working on updates” on your screen. This step is necessary because Windows cannot finish replacing files when it is running.
After the “working on updates” phase, Windows is supposed to finally shut down, but it doesn’t and Windows boots to the login screen. The problem was most likely related to the maintenance stack and the “shutdown” task is never performed during Windows reboots. It is either cleared or a race condition, such as Fast Startup, is blocking it.
