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”.

Windows Updates KB2468871 and KB2533523 Keep Reinstalling

On one of my workstations, Windows 7 kept re-installing two updates, KB2468871 and KB2533523, even though the installations were successful each time.

KB2468871 is titled "Update for Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 on Windows...". More details on this update can be found here.
KB2533523 has the same title, and more details on this update can also be found at Microsoft's website.
Some folks on the internet suggested downloading the update packages and installing them manually. So I did that. It did not help. Some suggested that the update should be done in safe mode. That did not work.

It turned out that for me, the cause of the problem was that I had a .NET 4 beta component installed, and I forgot to remove it. I saw it when I decided I was going to reinstall .NET 4. So I removed it. Now these updates are no longer trying to re-install themselves, finally.