OT: Problem launching programs in W10

Locate Windows Explorer (amongst Windows processes) and restart it. Does that work?

There's also SFC.

Open a command prompt with admin rights, then:

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

(will take a while to run)

SFC /scannow

See if that helps

But this is the problem.

No documentation.

No ability to use rational thought processes to debug launch.

You have more than one launcher, the Metro.App is HTML/JS with manifest and signing to validate launch. Whereas Win32 has much less of that sort of thing. And Win32 has "magic elevation based on name", so Setup.exe runs as Administrator.

It's a large bucket of crap, that deserves a book written about it.

Myself personally, I am no longer willing to run DISM and SFC like some religious festival... unless a symptom specifically points to a corruption of content. For example, at the current time, SFC is broken on W11, and it is bogging in WEBVIEW2 related stuff. DISM has similarly been tripped up, by random HTML files being left in package directories.

And with no good documentation, and the Google results being entirely irrelevant, what can we do next ? I notice my CoPilot has been gutted... so that's out. I'm outta ammo, and haven't even fired a gun.

You could try Process Monitor, on a working and non-working setup, and compare the traces, for a clue about what phase is dying. But there can be large gobs of irrelevant activity in such things (like a second process doing a tree descent during your launch). And the search in Process Monitor is now roughly 100x slower than it used to be, making working with large traces not all that practical.

You can also try the Microsoft Store Troubleshooter, for all the good that will do you.

Apparently Hamachi for windows conflicts with this stuff. I looked that up and it's a VPN, and this implies launch requires a network connection (for a Metro.App at least). But that's about all I got for breadcrumbs, in a Google search.

Paul

Many thanks, John - but I had already tried that.

The first time I ran DISM it reporterd that it found and replaced a couple of corrupted files - but that didn't fix the problem.

When the problem occurs, the system continues to run for a while as long as I don't need to launch any programs. But, a while after that, all my open programs begin to become unresponsive one by one untill nothing works.

I've subsequently found that I can recover without re-booting by using ctrl/alt/del and forcing it to sign me out. I can then sign back in, and it then works ok again for a while.

When the system was new - 2 or 3 years ago - I created a Rescue DVD, but I can't persuade it to boot from that. Very odd!

How well is your data backed up?

Are you getting to the stage where you'll bite the bullet and do a completely clean reinstall?

A Repair Install is good enough.

Download the ISO for the OS, from Microsoft. Go to the win10 download page from Linux or using a WinXP era machine, and they won't offer you MediaCreationTool, instead they just offer the ISO. Since you will not be burning a DVD with this (dual layer needed), it does not matter how big it is. The DVD will have eleven versions of Win10 on it (Enterprise is not on there).

Copy the ISO onto the machine, right-click and select "Mount" (works as long as Imgburn did not "steal" the mount option), and a virtual DVD drive will appear. Run Setup.exe off the virtual DVD drive. A Repair Install will be done, keeping user data and programs.

If it asks for a key, just click Skip. Both W10 and W11 have Skip.

Always have a full backup, before doing an install of this sort. You don't absolutely need it, and if your file system is corrupt, the backup software will catch that.

If the process goes badly and needs to roll back, you can stop it, and restore from your backup instead. Rollbacks can waste an hour of your time, and a restore from backup might be faster.

On my Optiplex 780, the 22H2 ISO was not compatible with the GMA (old old) graphics on the 780. The installation process with the mounted ISO got so far along, then it rolled back.

Repair Installs should be done with the same version or a newer version (Upgrade Install) can be done. You can use the built-in "winver.exe" executable, to determine the version. Look up the build number here.

Summary: Repair installs are quite practical, in that you don't need to know much about Windows, to repair Windows. But if the problem resides in the Registry, a Repair Install is not guaranteed to fix it. Also, a couple of your settings will need to be corrected later. It's pretty good about preservation, but this is Microsoft we're talking about. You need at least 20GB of space on C: for a Repair, and potentially more than that will be asked for. I think on a bigger machine, it wanted 85GB of space (hiberfil.sys).

You're getting pretty close, to a completely broken machine. Good luck! A Repair cannot be installed like on WinXP, over the existing OS. It can only be installed *while* the OS is running. If Setup.exe won't run, you're f***ed. Normally, such an incident would indicate malware. As the Setup.exe is Win32, there is no excuse not to start.

If one of the two security services stops running, shutdown is in 60 seconds. That was how Sasser presented symptoms. You could not Repair Install, if that's the situation, as the machine won't stay up long enough to finish. No, it's not Sasser. That's just an illustration of how tenuous this limitation of a running OS is, for a Repair Install on W10/W11.

A Clean Install is a lot more work, and more preparation steps are involved.

Paul

Many thanks for that. I'll study it in detail and try to follow it!

By the way, have you run Windows Memory Diagnostic? (Just type that into the start menu.)

Good point.

Yes, I ran the 2-pass test and it didn't find any problems. Should I run an extended version overnight?

That's actually a good test.

You shouldn't need to punish it. The quick test is enough to identify a problem, if there is a problem.

I had a problem that defied MemTest, and when the Windows one ran, it caught the problem. And the thing is, the MemTest one is more thorough, because it tests everything except around one megabyte of "Reserved" space which the BIOS uses. The Windows test does not test the entire address space, yet, whatever test pattern it uses, seems to be better at finding bus noise or something.

I never would have expected the Windows test to catch anything, but it really works.

Paul

If there's some weird hardware fault that triggers after an hour, the overnight test might find it. Mind you, I think this is probably software.

Yes, I think it's almost certainly software.

Does the fact that I can recover simply by logging off and back on again without actually re-booting offer any clues?

It could be malware..check with an antivirus scan.