Windows 10 update breaks its built-in antivirus protection

Windows 10’s built-in antivirus app, Windows Defender, is reportedly misfiring and failing to fully complete virus scans, apparently due to some kind of bug – although exactly where this gremlin in the works might be isn’t clear yet.

Windows Latest picked up on this, and there are multiple reports on Reddit and Microsoft’s Answers.com help forum where people are finding that Windows Defender is reporting the following: “Items skipped during scan.”

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The error explains that some items were skipped and not scanned due to “exclusion or network scanning settings”.

That’s not much of an explanation, and indeed those who are reporting this problem say they don’t have any exclusions applied, and haven’t made any changes to their network settings recently.

It isn’t made clear how many items were skipped, or indeed if any were skipped at all – there is the possibility that this is a false error, and the bug is simply the error message popping up (as opposed to files not being scanned).

However, if it is the case th