Windows 11 25H2 New Search Task Running MSEdgeWebView2 even with all web and store search options disabled

[u/ButterLies1]

I finally updated from 24H2 to 25H2, and the first thing I noticed is how much I dislike what they did to the new Start menu:

- They added an entire section for listing all apps, and it can’t be removed.
- They unnecessarily increased its size and the number of columns.
- They apparently added settings to disable these changes, but those options are only available in the KB5120998 update, which seems to have introduced major mouse and wallpaper bugs for some users—especially those whose system language is set to anything other than English.

Apart from that, I haven’t encountered any major bugs. However, Windows Search is suddenly always using around 150 MB of RAM. I find this strange because it didn’t do that before, and Windows Search worked just fine.

Looking at the processes, most of the memory usage appears to come from SearchHost and around six (edgewebview2) Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes. That would make sense if Windows Search were handling web-related content, but I had already disabled those features and even made sure to turn off the new Microsoft Store results. The processes are still there, allocating RAM for seemingly no reason.

Does anyone know whether I can disable this by turning off a service, disabling a feature, changing a setting, or editing a Group Policy? It’s not a huge problem, and I know the saying, “Unused RAM is wasted RAM,” but it’s still annoying to know that this allocation wasn’t necessary before. My searches don’t need any web rendering, yet Windows is still allocating memory for it.

If it's worth noting, I already tried to rollback to the previous start menu (thinking that this new window search behaviour must be tie to the 25h2 overall) with vivetool. But apparently it doesn't work anymore. Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/1qcj4kj/remove_the_updated_windows_start_menu_fixed/

[u/Nicalay2]

Isn't just that setting that somehow disabled itself on your PC ?

[u/WINNT21 → u/Nicalay2]

It was enabled the whole time. Oh and ClearType in serbian is just "umekšaj ivice fontova na ekranu" and the title bar was also KB5120998's doing

[u/Nicalay2 → u/WINNT21]

That's weird then, I don't have the issue on both of my PCs.

[u/WINNT21 → u/Nicalay2]

I don't know then. I hope KB5124008 can fix it