Microsoft drops PowerToys Preview v0.101.2241.0 with Mouse Highlighter and localization fixes
Microsoft has published another PowerToys Preview this week. The update lands four bug fixes and a build-system pin for the v0.101.x cycle.
PowerToys holds a steady spot as one of the largest open-source Windows toolkits on GitHub, sitting around 138,000 stars. This preview is part of the v0.101.x wave built against .NET 10. If you've got the preview channel enabled, you'll get this drop automatically. It's a maintenance cycle. No new features. Just polish.
User-facing fixes
Mouse Highlighter gets the most complex patch. The ripple effect was sticking after rapid clicks or drags. Clint Rutkas traced the bug to synchronous WinRT Composition calls running inside the WH_MOUSE_LL mouse hook callback. When the hook chain exceeded its timeout budget, Windows silently dropped the button-up event. The ripple would stay frozen. The fix moves event capture into a constant-time operation backed by a ring buffer, then posts messages to the module's window thread. All WinRT work stays thread-affine. Gamers and anyone using a high-polling-rate mouse will see the ripple behave correctly now.
File Locksmith had a localization regression. Right-click context menu entries like "What's using this file?" were rendering in English on non-English Windows builds. Makoto Sakaguchi rewired the resource compilation so labels now respect your OS locale.
Quick Accent users scrolling to the bottom of long accent lists could see the character insert correctly but the selection highlight would vanish. A 1 DIP padding tweak fixes the WinUI compositor clipping without breaking RTL layouts.
New+ desktop icon placement was snapping icons to default positions regardless of where you right-clicked. Christian Gaarden Gaardmark added per-monitor DPI awareness to cursor capture so icons land near your pointer. He also replaced a fixed sleep with a polling loop for the rename entry, which kills the flicker when Explorer hasn't realized the new item yet.
Build and CI updates
The CI pipeline was pinned to exact .NET 10 SDK version 10.0.302. The build had been using a floating channel that pulled the latest servicing release, causing version mismatches with NuGet runtime packages. Yu Leng and moooyo centralized the version string in Directory.Packages.props so future SDK bumps won't break dependency audits.
You can download the installers from the GitHub releases page. There are four packages available: per-user and machine-wide, both x64 and ARM64.
