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This seems like an every other update occurrence with Windows 10. Just curious how many others have had the fun of trying to reinstall the Windows 10 "Modern Apps" that fail and then prevent you from opening the start menu and any of the new "apps". It blows me away that this bug seems to still exist in newer releases of Windows 10. Currently looking at a fresh install as I was able to get it to work temporarily with PowerShell but now it's just giving me the good ole' "CTRL+ALT+YOU"!

Seriously Microsoft, this is probably the single most annoying reoccuring bug in Windows 10 that has existed since at least release if not beta.

Whelp... did the Windows 10 "Reset" PC where it uninstalls all of the apps. Was working good for a bit, but back to being broken. Got to love this crap.

My usual troubleshooting process for them:
Is Windows up to date, including video and audio drivers?
Do they work if I go back to the default antivirus?

If yes, problem solved and never use that antivirus again.

Don't think I've run into that issue before. Then again I almost never use the MS store and I used powershell to nuke most of the bundled apps I couldn't uninstall via apps & features.

I've never really had a problem with modern apps except in a specific instance. When I sysprep stuff.

I don't use Modern apps per se either. But the Windows Start menu and all of the Win 10 menus for settings are apart of the Windows 10 Modern apps suite. If it breaks you cant open any of those new things.

I've used powershell to get it back in the past for client machines. No video or other major driver issues. System is up to date which may be apart of the issue, recent updates break older hardware regularly. This happens on my wife's older laptop with a first gen Intel CPU.

I'm rather happy my moms Turion 2 laptop is still running Windows 10 happily and it's easily far better than any previous Windows. Score one for a decent video chip (Also unsupported, but the machine does still work surprisingly well for modern casual usage...just painful to update.)

Anyway, I think I was just having that happen on my brothers Atom (Bay Trail) machine so yeah I can see how it'd irritate you, but I got the latest Intel graphics drivers on it and it's fine now.

(Was working on all three of his machines at once just for the hell of it.)

(If only the dumb thing had enough space to actually get the latest version of W10 on. Working on it, kinda. He just died so not really feeling the need.)

Welch wrote:

But the Windows Start menu and all of the Win 10 menus for settings are a part of the Windows 10 Modern apps suite. If it breaks you cant open any of those new things.

I was unaware of this; good thing to know. I have not had a reason to use modern apps, and I may purposely avoid them if there is the potential for them to break the Win10 start and settings menus.

Powershell is the only way to reliably install and uninstall Modern apps that don't behave.

I'd strongly recommend you just try and find normal Win32 or Win64 API applications instead though; no matter how much the pro-Microsoft zealots preach the advantages of Modern apps and UWP apps, they do seem to be a mess in terms of losing your preferences, failing altogether, failing on update, getting replaced by Microsoft's latest zany idea of how you should do something, or are just plain buggy and crash (I assume it's because vendors spend most, if not all, of their time on the core Win32, iOS and Android versions instead).

Chrispy_ wrote:

Powershell is the only way to reliably install and uninstall Modern apps that don't behave.

I'd strongly recommend you just try and find normal Win32 or Win64 API applications instead though; no matter how much the pro-Microsoft zealots preach the advantages of Modern apps and UWP apps, they do seem to be a mess in terms of losing your preferences, failing altogether, failing on update, getting replaced by Microsoft's latest zany idea of how you should do something, or are just plain buggy and crash (I assume it's because vendors spend most, if not all, of their time on the core Win32, iOS and Android versions instead).

I do 'preach,' but not as a full on replacement for the apps you want to use. I don't really ever go outside of the default apps anymore (except browser) and they've been great 95% of the time...really haven't seen those issues at all.

They were a lot less reliable in previous versions of Windows 10, I'll definitely give you that...but then, the entire platform was a lot less mature. These days I don't see the point of win32 at all (except obviously where someone is having issues with them, or it doesn't have the kind of apps you need.)

Welch wrote:

prevent you from opening the start menu and any of the new "apps".

I've run into that 2-3 times now. I think all cases were with people who had never intentionally used a modern app other than the start menu itself so I can't speak about whether the app settings get forgotten.

I have been using Windows 10 since the beginning and have never run into this problem. LostCat is probably onto something, though I'd widen the scope beyond AV software. Something on that machine isn't playing nice with UWP, for sure.

Saying "just don't use those apps" is not a viable answer. I'd probably reset the machine again (or install fresh if possible) and then go slowly when adding apps. My PC has the fairly common loadout of Office 2016, Steam, Blizzard, and a handful of UWP games like Killer Instinct and Halo Wars 2, alongside VS 2017 Community and Sonar (RIP Cakewalk). I don't run a third-party anti-virus and I can't say for sure that doing so would break anything, but millions of PCs ship with AV installed and work just fine.

I've not seen it actually break any Modern apps... I am kind of annoyed that they keep reinstalling crap like Candy Crush, and with the most recent update they've installed a couple of VR apps that apparently cannot be uninstalled (or at least, the uninstall options are grayed out) but they're small enough that they can just be ignored.

cphite wrote:

I've not seen it actually break any Modern apps... I am kind of annoyed that they keep reinstalling crap like Candy Crush, and with the most recent update they've installed a couple of VR apps that apparently cannot be uninstalled (or at least, the uninstall options are grayed out) but they're small enough that they can just be ignored.

...as long as they haven't installed background services which could potentially break something else.

This is one of the two big reasons I'm pushing out Win10 LTSB images instead of plain Win10 Enterprise. Most of my users don't need Metro apps and never use them anyway.

just brew it! wrote:

...as long as they haven't installed background services which could potentially break something else.

Windows Runtime apps can't install services. At all. They might be considered part of the overall platform though, since VR/AR/whateverR is a big thing right now.