New Answer (2020-10-22)
By now, there are dedicated settings allowing you to control this behavior.
Go to Settings > Account > Sign-in options and scroll down to the bottom. There will be two settings:
- "Automatically save my restartable apps when I sign out and restart them after I sign in." (new in Windows 10 2004)
- "Use my sign-in info to automatically finish setting up my device after an update or restart."
I recommend turning both off, despite only the first seemingly dealing with this feature. I still noticed some apps opening after a restart if I did not turn off both options.

The following, old answer workarounds this by using a script to shutdown:
Old Answer
Here's a silly workaround for the similarly silly new feature.
Some background first: Windows seems to shutdown as if %WINDIR%\system32\shutdown.exe
was invoked with the /sg /hybrid /t 0
parameters. The magic is in the /sg
parameter which tells it to "restart any registered applications" on the next boot. The "old" /s
parameter still exists and shutdown
can be invoked with it manually.
To quickly call shutdown.exe
like that, create a shortcut either in your apps list (%PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
for all users, %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs
for the current user), or somewhere else and then pin it to start.
The important shortcut properties are the following:
- Name:
Shutdown
- Target:
%WINDIR%\system32\shutdown.exe /s /hybrid /t 0
- Start in:
%WINDIR%\system32
Optional:
- Name: Add a non-breakable space (Alt+Num255) in front of it to appear at the top of the All Apps list. You can try other fancy Unicode characters if you like.
- Run:
Minimized
to prevent the ugly command prompt from popping up shortly.
- Icon: Change to something nice (there's an XP-style shutdown icon available in the default
shell32.dll
, or some close / critical icons in imageres.dll
).
- Comment: Leave a rant here about the dumb new feature.
It can look like this in the end:

If you want a shortcut doing the same for restarting, the old /r
switch can be used which was replaced by the new /g
switch.