PowerToys v0.101.2222.0 Preview: Regression fixes, DWM cloaking, and massive test expansion
PowerToys v0.101.2222.0 preview release. No new features. Just quality.
Microsoft shipped this preview build on August 11, 2026, bringing four merged pull requests focused on stability and infrastructure. The release manager is Boliang Zhang, and the changes cover a critical settings regression, a cleanup of Quick Accent's window composition, and a huge expansion to the UI test suite.
PowerToys lives in preview limbo these days. The stable branch sits elsewhere. Every preview release comes with a warning. This one keeps that tradition. You're looking at internal reliability work, not shiny new tools. The regression fix on the General page also needs to land on stable, which suggests the team is aware of the issue across both branches.
Highlights
The Settings General page finally works. Clicking it in the navigation pane used to do nothing. A WinUI style mismatch was to blame. The fix swapped SecondaryTextStyle for SecondaryIsEnabledTextBlockStyle on the Update Channel description. This regression came from PR #49722. Community member #49803 reported the issue, and the fix merged the same day. That's fast. 185 unit tests now verify the General header and Update Channel controls render correctly in Release x64 builds.
Quick Accent stops flashing stale frames when summoned. The accent bar previously showed artifacts from the previous state before the character list laid out. The fix replaces opacity-based masking with DWM cloaking. The window stays shown to XAML but invisible to DWM until composition finishes. It's the same pattern Command Palette uses now. That change removed 87 net lines from MainWindow. The window stays click-through while dormant. 32 unit tests pass. Wide characters render correctly at full width.
Path resolution got a boost. GetPowerToysInstallPath() now prefers the running executable's directory over the registry for release builds. The registry lookup remains as a fallback, which matters for the packaged Command Palette extension host running from WindowsApps\. The resolver is elevation-aware, checking per-machine keys when running with admin rights. This affects deep links, Workspaces launches, and module executables.
Test infrastructure received a massive injection. A 57-commit PR added end-to-end UI tests on the winappcli framework. Image Resizer, Peek, and File Explorer add-ons now have proper test coverage. The CI plumbing handles self-signed MSIX packages for shell-extension tests. You can also run these suites locally in persistent virtual machines using dockur/windows. Tests pass across x64 Win10, x64 Win11, and arm64.
It's not the sexiest release. You won't find a new utility here. But the regression fix on the General page matters, especially since it affects stable. The Quick Accent fix is a solid win for usability. You might have noticed that flicker before. The move to DWM cloaking suggests the team is standardizing patterns across modules. That bodes well for consistency. The test expansion is huge for long-term stability. Catching regressions before they hit your machine matters more than a feature that breaks on launch.
Contributors included Yu Leng, Gordon Lam, and Gleb Khmyznikov. Copilot was listed as a co-author on several PRs. If you're keeping score, that's a lot of AI-assisted dev work in a single preview. Microsoft's internal tools are clearly feeding back into the open source project.
Head here to download the preview. Keep in mind this is a preview build, not the stable release.
