‘You did say how much you loved Vista’ – Microsoft’s most hated operating system pops up in Windows 11’s weirdest glitch ever

• Windows 11 test builds are playing the Windows Vista startup sound
• A Microsoft exec has confirmed that this is a bug in those previews
• That seems a startling coincidence, given that Microsoft has recently been poking fun at Apple’s Liquid Glass for looking like Windows Vista

In one of the strangest developments with Windows 11 in some time, test builds of the operating system have been temporarily hit by a bug that has changed the startup sound.

That’s the soundbite played when the desktop first appears, and instead of the usual Windows 11 ditty, testers in the Beta and Dev channels were booting their PCs to hear the noise from Windows Vista (and Windows 7) instead.

Those four nostalgic notes will immediately transport anyone who owned a PC with those operating systems right back to that era in computing history, and no doubt immediately confused a whole bunch of testers.

Why did this happen? Xeno, the Windows tester who flagged this as a bug on X (see the above post spotted by Tom’s Hardware), received confirmation from Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc, a senior product manager for Windows at the company, that it is indeed a glitch.

But not before LeBlanc joked: “I went in and had some fun with the sound files in Windows and thought folks needed a blast from the past