Until Microsoft fixes this issue removing any external media is a decent workaround, but those who use an SD card to make up for a lack of disk space will face problems. Threshold 2 requires 20GB of free space for the installation and that may prove a lot to free up.
A Reddit thread notes that Threshold 2 is deleting a number of installed programs as it upgrades. Posters have a long list, including CPU-Z, speccy, 8gadgetpack, a Cisco VPN client, SATA drivers, SpyBot, RSAT, F5 VPN, HWMonitor and more.
Of course these can be reinstalled and you will be notified of any removed programs after the installation, but 1. This shouldn’t happen in the first place, and 2. There should be a warning in advance, not just after they were removed. There’s also something a theme here: many are system monitoring tools. Has Microsoft something planned in this space for the future and is quietly removing the competition? Only time will tell, but I suspect that won’t stop the conspiracy theories growing.
On top of this gHacks has spotted that after installing Threshold 2 users are finding it has changed a number of default app choices back to Microsoft services. Microsoft has been guilty of this before, but your choices can easily be restored by going to: System > Default Apps and rechoosing what you want - not that you should have to do this in the first place, of course.
This is a somewhat baffling decision since Threshold 2 allows users to downgrade to a previous version of Windows. Furthermore - in something of a Windows 10 update role reversal - if you uninstall the Threshold 2 update then it won’t reinstall automatically and you’ll need to get it from the Microsoft website.
I suspect this is just until the next batch of updates which will trigger more automatic updates, but it’s a curious move in the first place which will have some users hopeful that Microsoft is considering loosening some of its vice-like control over the OS.
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