My road to Windows 10 - Edge (lost but found)

Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 12:30 PM UTC

Today I encountered a very strange behaviour of my Windows 10 machine. I have to say that I didn't update to the "Anniversary" update on my production machine, yet (as I am not able to start any update until my admin opens it for us). So the following happened on a Windows 10 build 1511.

I used Edge to open some pages from the company's intranet and tools. I set them as start pages (4 pieces so far). I saw several problems:

  • sometimes the tab said "no network connection" but after reload everything was fine (and of course I had a connection as I worked with other apps flawlessly)
  • sometimes tabs wanted to display popups (none of the pages ever wanted to open a popup but I confirmed them to be ok to open)
  • last hing I saw was Edge crashing several times
  • my start menu didn't show up since then (well sometimes but mostly not) and all related stuff also stopped working, e.g. volume/mixer from the taskbar, info center, Win-key, Win-S (search) etc.

So it's only a guess that Edge is also responsible for the things not working from the list above, because it turned out that I lost it - it was completely gone!

No Edge in the "all apps" menu, nothing the search could show me, no executable anymore - Edge was completely wiped from my system. After some research I found out that a corrupted registry was the reason for this. This is the time for a question: how the heck could the registry got fucked up without any action taken by me or another software? Could it be that this happened due the crashes I had? We will never know and - to be honest - I don't give a shit why this happened. It's just not supposed to happen!

So, to fix this you have to open an administrative powershell instance by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-ESC (which brings up the task manager). Here you goto file, start application, tick the "run as administrator" checkbox and type "Powershell" (without quotes). A new powershell will show up. Here you type the following command and then just lean back and watch.

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

This somehow fixed the registry and my Edge browser is back in the show.







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