Windows 10 Store, Calculator, Photos, etc Apps Not Working

After using Windows 10 for a few months, problems seem to show up every once in a while. First problem was that the Windows Start Menu stopped working. Using mouse or keyboard made no difference, left click wouldn’t do anything, but gladly right click could still bring up a text menu. To fix this, the very famous powershell code: Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”} solved the problem nicely.

Everything was back to working till New Year’s Eve, a new Windows 10 ver 1511 OS build 10586.36 was available for download. After a short while, Start Menu disappeared again. This time, the very famous powershell code didn’t help as expected. I tried a number of methods including sfc, dism, regedit to check read permission, use exact App folder name, add a new user profile, delete corrupted folder, start application identity service, reset store cache, etc… Too bad, none of them works!

Searching the Internet with keywords like Windows 10 Apps Not Working would generate many similar results, almost all of them are talking about that very famous powershell code, yea, it’s like that line of code can do everything. Or, are those folks just building links for their blogs? Anyway, I ended up using Recovery to bring back the previous state – the basic Windows 10. The recovery managed to bring back the Start Menu function, but with quite a few broken Apps including Store, Calculator, Photos and a bunch of others.

Using that very famous powershell code, broken Apps remain broken, there was some red error message mentioning “Merge Failure etc etc”… Some suggest that only an in-place upgrade would solve the issue, but some also report that in-place upgrade would not repair the system and only make the matter worse. The last resort would be using “Reset this PC”, but it would delete all the extra programs that I installed.

Oh, something interesting happened few days ago, the Photos App started working again mysteriously. Hmm, maybe I should just wait for an update fix. Unfortunately, the recent Cumulative Update for Windows 10 for x64-based Systems (KB3124266) didn’t solve the Apps broken problem. I guess, for people who have similar problems, we can only wait for a workable Update in the near future. Is it time to think of other OS? Hey, I think Microsoft will fix this eventually. Why? Without Windows Store, how can people buy new Apps or purchase game gold for popular games like Candy Crush Saga? You see, now without Windows Store, I cannot unlock new episode using game gold and I’ve to wait for 3 days, how inconvenient! 🙂

Jul 30 16: The latest updates are really helpful, now everything backs to normal. Calculator, Store, etc apps are working now. 🙂

Update for Windows 10 Version 1511 for x64-based Systems (KB3173428)
Update for Windows 10 Version 1511 for x64-based Systems (KB3152599)