Fix Windows 8.1 Cannot Launch “PC Settings” or “Store” Problem

On my Windows 8.1 Desktop Computer, I have two user accounts.  One is connected to my “Microsoft Account” online. It was created when I installed Windows 8.1 on this PC. The other is a Windows domain user account. It was setup when I joined this PC to a local Windows domain.

In the “Microsoft Account”, I am able to run all “Metro Apps” or “Modern Apps”. I can go to “Microsoft Store”, etc. Everything seems to work fine.

But in the domain user account, there are all sorts of problems. In the “Action Center” of the control panel, I kept getting errors saying that I needed to enter a password to connect to a “Microsoft Account”. But when I clicked on “Enter Password”, the “PC Settings” app flashed on the screen, and nothing followed. An icon for “PC Settings” showed up on the task bar, but when I clicked on it, a gigantic “PC Settings”  icon flashed by, and still nothing happened. In the event log, I saw the following:

“Activation of app windows.immersivecontrolpanel_cw5n1h2txyewy!microsoft.windows.immersivecontrolpanel failed with error: This app does not support the contract specified or is not installed. See the Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational log for additional information.”

I searched online, and it turned out that this had to be fixed by running three powershell commands from an administrator command prompt:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\camera\AppxManifest.xml

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\FileManager\AppxManifest.xml

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\ImmersiveControlPanel\AppxManifest.xml

The link is here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-winapps/i-cant-open-any-windows-8-apps-including-pc/aaa88b5e-98c6-4958-a896-b991b924e4f0?rtAction=1407081231306

It turned out that this “Add-AppxPackage” command is a cure for the “Microsoft Store” problem as well:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register $Env:SystemRoot\WinStore\AppxManifest.xml

The link is here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-windows_store/windows-81-store-stuck-on-load-loop/827ba1d0-d49b-4aae-87ef-70180b645e48

The Microsoft Store error in the event log looked like this:

“Activation of app winstore_cw5n1h2txyewy!Windows.Store failed with error: This app does not support the contract specified or is not installed. See the Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational log for additional information.”

Obviously this is not something that we outside of Microsoft could have figured out on our own.  But if this happens every time when a domain user is added to a Windows 8.1 machine, I wonder why Microsoft has not patched it.

Perhaps few in the corporate world care about the “Modern Apps” or the “Microsoft Store”. That cannot be good news for Microsoft. Then again Windows patches have been making my PC not bootable from time to time in the last few months. It seemed to have been caused by an “AMD WDDM1.3 driver update”, but I am not certain. Until I am certain, Windows auto update has to stay at “Off”.

My Internet Explorer Was Not Showing Any Browsing History

This started when I moved my Windows OS installation onto an SSD drive. The SSD drive holds the OS, program installations, and all temporary files.

Because it is only 250 GB, my user files are stored on a pair of old fashioned 7200RPM hard drives configured in a RAID 0 configuration. This drive is mounted as "C:\users\%username%". I copied Windows generated contents into this "folder", and everything works fine. Except IE. It no longer showed any files in its "History" window. I moved its "Temporary Internet Files" folder to the SSD to get better performance, but its history window was still empty. The "Temporary Internet Files" folder had files, but they were just now shown in the history window.

I was running Windows 7 back then. So I figured that I would upgrade to Windows 8, and the IE problem would go away. Well it did not. Worse, Windows 8 installation did not understand that "C:\users\%username%" was not a regular folder but a mounted drive, and created a mess. I had to manually fix the mess.

The IE problem persisted. I was running a newer version of IE, but it still would not show any files in its history window.

Then I upgraded to Windows 8.1. The IE problem was still there. Windows 8.1 installation did not understand that "C:\users\%username%" was not a regular folder but a mounted drive, either. I had to manually fix the installation mess, again.

Yesterday, I saw this at "answers.microsoft.com":  "IE11 no history displayed". It turns out that I need to have a "system" attribute set on "C:\users\%username%\appdata\local\Microsoft\Windows\history". Apparently when I copied my files to the drive mounting folder, the attributes were lost, even though I could swear that I used the preserving attribute option on the copy.

So I added the "S" attribute as suggested. Now IE history is working again. Finally.

The original answer was from "social.technet.microsoft.com": http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/6418ae13-63c7-44a1-9e97-0ad875a2bd7a/browsing-history-not-being-recorded?forum=ieitprocurrentver

Thank you Rory.