At some point last year I had a problem with the Windows 10 Photo App not launching properly. In my attempts to repair it I ended up breaking all of the built-in Windows 10 Apps including the Store.

The Apps were now all in a state where they had no Icons, and their names were along the lines of “@Microsoft.WindowsStore….” and would not launch at all.

I attempted numerous fixes and read up many articles with suggested fixes to no avail including:

• Running System File Checker “sfc /scannow” – no problems found
• Attempting to reset the Windows store with “wsreset” – no change
• Running DISM with the “/scanhealth”, “/checkhealth” and then “/restorehealth” flags – Fixed some problems though no change to the Windows Apps

You can re-install all of the Windows Apps using the following Powershell command, however beware, this is what caused my problems to begin with!

Get-AppXPackage | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register “$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml”}

For me running this would spew out a bunch of errors similar to the following:

You may notice in the error description the recommendation to check the Event Log or using the cmdlet “Get-AppxLog”. I ran the latter which gave me the following output:

As you will see from the top of the last screenshot, there is a problem accessing a “.xml” file in the “C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository” directory.
So off I go to said directory and lo and behold the error is quite right! The file it is looking for does not exist!

If you browse to the aforementioned directory you should find that it is full of “.xml” files for each of the Applications, likely many for different versions.
What I did next was to check for a similar named file albeit for a different version of the application and copy it. I then renamed it to that which the error was stating is missing.Voila! If I now attempt to install the specific App using:

Add-AppxPackage -Register “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\<application folder>\AppxManifest.xml” -DisableDevelopmentMode

The install completes and I can then successfully launch the application again.

If you run the above cmdlet for each broken application and then use the suggested “Get-AppxLog” from the error output you can determine the file that is missing and needs creating.

In a couple of cases there wasn’t a similarly named file for me to take a copy from. In this case I copied one of the other Application “.xml” files, renamed it and edited the “.xml” contents to match the details of the App I was repairing.

Anyway, this successfully repaired ALL of my broken applications. I hadn’t seen this method posted elsewhere on the Web thus the reason for this post. Hopefully it helps someone else out there.

Good Luck!