Category Archives: Troubleshooting

Device drivers, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

AMD Gets New Chipset Driver

February 18, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here I go again. I read this morning on Neowin that AMD had dropped a new version of its chipset drivers, including the B550 in my Flo6 and RyzenOfc desktops. Time for an upgrade! I found what I needed at the Chipset Driver Release Notes 8.01.20.513 page (a 62.5MB download named amd_chipset_software_8.01.20.513.exe). After applying that file, AMD gets new chipset driver upon reboot. What happened on my ASRock system was a little more vexing…and complicated. Let me explain…

After AMD Gets New Chipset Driver, Comes a Reboot

The UEFI on my ASRock B550 Extreme4 motherboard is a little tetchy. Whenever the firmware or drivers get touched (updated or replaced), it tends to hang on a black screen after a reboot intended to flush out old stuff and bring in new. Sure enough, that’s what happened after the AMD chipset installer fired off a restart with my express permission.

I had to do a deep cold start to bring the motherboard back to life. That meant:
1. Hold the power button down until the system turns off
2. Turn off the PSU
3. Hold the power button down another 10-15 seconds to discharge any capacative devices
4. Turn off, then unplug the power cord from the PSU
5. Wait 2-5 minutes for everything to turn itself completely off
6. Plug the PSU back in, turn on its power switch
7. Use the front power switch to start the PC back up
Fortunately, that worked and the unit came back to life.

Checking the Install

I’m learning to make doubly-darned sure that an update actually gets applied, thanks to some recent misadventures with Secure Boot. I visited Device Manager and made sure no yellow triangle warnings popped up, nor did anything appear under the always-annoying “Other Devices” heading.

At Copilot’s urging, I also checked the install dates for all of my AMD drivers. Copilot also confirmed that those dates matched the latest ones in the afore-linked release note (and hence, should be current).

I used this handy PowerShell one-liner to elicit the data shown in the next screencap:

Get-WmiObject Win32_PnPSignedDriver | Where-Object { $_.DeviceName -like “*AMD*” } | Select-Object DeviceName, DriverVersion, DriverDate

Here’s the resulting output:

After checking these against the release notes, reported dates = current dates.

It looks like the chipset update got properly applied. Copilot tells me other UEFIs will reboot after a chipset update without the 7-step polka the ASRock board needed. I wish I had another AMD system around here to verify that claim. But here in Windows-World we don’t always get what we want. Good enough for now, I guess!

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11, Windows Update

CU Aftermath: One TPM Update Elicits WTF?

February 11, 2026 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

Microsoft’s February 2026 cumulative update, KB5077181, brought most Windows 11 25H2 systems up to build 26200.7840. At least, that’s what I was expecting. But as I rolled out the update across a mix of systems here at Chez Tittel, I noticed something odd. My Lenovo ThinkPads and an ASUS Zenbook A14 quietly updated and rebooted into 26200.7840. The DIY desktop (built on an ASRock motherboard with a Ryzen 5800X) threw a TPM warning and required multiple reboots after a forced cold startup. You guessed it: that one TPM elicits WTF as I must respond to “Update Y/N” for things to proceed.

One TPM Update Elicits WTF, Others Don’t

Let’s unpack what happened. First, the update itself. KB5077181 is a standard cumulative update, but it also includes boot-chain changes that affect Secure Boot and TPM values. On systems with stable firmware and well-behaved TPM implementations, these changes get absorbed quietly. That’s what happened on my Lenovo and ASUS laptops. They rebooted twice and landed on build 26200.7840 without a peep. Copilot tells me that the first reboot is for a servicing stack update, the second for the aforementioned CU.

The ASRock-based Ryzen system, aka “Flo6,” had a different reaction. Upon reboot it froze on a black screen. After I cycled power and forced a cold boot, it presented a UEFI-level prompt. That prompt warned about changes to the TPM and Secure Boot configuration, and asked me to enter “Y” to confirm, or “N” to deny. This signals that the Platform Configuration Register 7 (PCR 7) that tracks Secure Boot components has detected a change. The system requires manual confirmation to proceed and reseal the TPM, followed with an additional reboot. But man, is that a cryptic message or what? (It appears as the lead-in graphic above.)

Why this discrepancy? It comes down to platform differences. OEM systems like Lenovo and ASUS laptops benefit from tightly integrated firmware, drivers, and update pipelines. Their UEFI implementations are mature. Also, their TPM and Secure Boot configurations get validated against Microsoft’s updates. Thus, they handle PCR changes gracefully and typically reseal the TPM silently with no user intervention.

The ASRock Difference

ASRock, on the other hand, does things differently. Though their firmware is functional and generally reliable, but it’s not as polished or tightly integrated as enterprise-grade or premium OEM systems. ASRock tends to use more standard, out-of-the-box AMI firmware. It offers only minimal validation for Secure Boot and TPM changes. Combine that with AMD’s fTP (known to be more sensitive to boot-chain changes than Intel’s PTT), and you get a prompt for TPM confirmation after updates like KB5077181.

You Get What You Pay For

That’s not to say ASRock is bad. For enthusiasts and DIY builders, their boards offer decent value and performance. But when it comes to firmware maturity and seamless integration with Windows security features, they’re noticeably behind the big OEMs.

The takeaway? Platform matters. As Windows continues to evolve its security posture, particularly around Secure Boot, TPM, and boot checks, users should expect some variation in how different systems respond to updates. OEM systems generally offer a smoother ride. DIY builds like my ASRock-based Flo6, appear to need more attention and manual intervention.

For those who live in the trenches of Windows-World, it’s just another reminder of how things sometimes work, or not. The best antidote is to know your hardware, expect the unexpected, and keep recovery media handy, just in case something goes awry. I’m glad I didn’t need recovery for this update. Indeed, I started wondering when I had to cycle power for a cold start, and an extra reboot to get to the desktop.

Hardware Reviews, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Zotac 4070 Shows Up Munged

February 10, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Got an email last night from the USPS, informing me that the Zotac 4070 card I ordered would be delivered by 6:30 PM. This morning I walked to the mailbox to retrieve that item. As you can see in the edge-on photo, the 800-lb gorilla had his way with the card during shipment. The front plate is badly bent. Worse, the right-hand fan (from the top) doesn’t spin freely, as it properly should. I’m asking for a refund, as the Zotac 4070 shows up munged.

If Zotac 4070 Shows Up Munged, Now What?

I’m ordering a replacement card. Given the issues finding a performance GPU that’s also compact, I’m “trading down” to get a 5060 model for my next try. I just ordered a Gigabyte RTX 5060 Mini from Amazon, for delivery tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m fighting with the vendor platform — Mercari, in this case — for a refund. Somehow, the sale shows as completed even though I hadn’t even had the card in my hands for 18 hours when that status made itself known. I’m hoping I’ll get the purchase price back, but I have a bad feeling…

As I opened the package, in fact, I saw the front plate had been savaged in transit. “That can’t be good,” I thought. It wasn’t. Gosh only knows what hit this unit, but it literally looks stepped on. I can only hope I’ll get a refund: we’ll see about that.

Tomorrow Is Another Day

Amazon will put the next candidate in my hands tomorrow morning. I’ve never had trouble with their delivery resulting in damage of any kind, let alone the mauling that the Zotac card took en route. Fingers crossed that I can get it installed, and Secure Boot working, on the upstairs B550/5800X PC. These things happen here in Windows-World. Several lessons learned from this encounter, none of them good. Sigh, and sigh again…

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

Sysmon Lands in Windows 11 Beta

February 6, 2026 Ed Tittel 2 Comments

Lots of Windows nerds have spent years bolting Sysinternals’ Sysmon into every PC we work on. For them — and me — the latest Windows 11 Beta build (26220.7752) brings a welcome surprise: Sysmon is now a built-in optional feature. That’s right — no more downloading, unzipping, or scripting installs from Sysinternals. No need to run its handy web-based version, either. Microsoft has quietly slipped this powerful tool into the OS itself, and it’s ready to roll with some simple PowerShell commands.

What Sysmon Lands in Windows 11 Beta Means

Sysmon (System Monitor) has long been a staple in toolkits for security pros, blue teamers, and forensic analysts. It provides deep visibility into system activity — process creation, network connections, file writes, registry changes, and more. Until now, deploying Sysmon meant managing binaries and XML configuration files. With its inclusion as a Windows Optional Feature, Sysmon becomes easier to deploy, update, and manage across PC fleets.

PowerShell: Enable and Install Sysmon

To enable the built-in Sysmon feature from Windows itself, and then start monitoring stuff, run these two commands:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Sysmon
sysmon -i

In case it’s not obvious, the first command enables the Sysmon feature; the second installs it, ready for use.

Quick Peek: View Sysmon Events

Here’s a PowerShell one-liner that shows the 25 most recent Sysmon events. Gives a taste of how it works and what it shows:

Get-WinEvent -LogName “Microsoft-Windows-Sysmon/Operational” -MaxEvents 25 | Format-Table -AutoSize

Unless your PC is acting up or ill, sysmon mostly shows process creation and termination (like here).

What Sysmon Illuminates

Sysmon shines brightest when you need to understand what’s really happening under the hood in Windows. It logs detailed info about process creation, including parent-child relationships, command-line arguments, and DLLs loaded. Sysmon captures network connections with source and destination IPs, ports, and process IDs. It can even detect code injections, image loads, and registry modifications. With a well-tuned configuration, Sysmon becomes a forensic goldmine. It’s like a time machine for system activity. Properly used, it can help you trace malware behavior, insider threats, and suspicious persistence mechanisms.

Adding Sysmon Into the Mix Is Good!

The integration of Sysmon into Windows 11 Beta is a quiet but powerful shift. It signals Microsoft’s growing commitment to built-in security observability and makes it easier than ever to deploy advanced monitoring at scale. For IT pros and security teams, this is a win. If you’re running a Beta build, it’s time to fire up PowerShell, flip the switch, and start watching your system like never before.

Showcasing Sysmon in Action

Sysmon’s long history in the Windows ecosystem is best illustrated through several well‑known case studies that show how deeply it illuminates system behavior. Both cases listed below not only show Sysmon’s diagnostic power but also its ability to reveal subtle, causal relationships that define complex system activity.

Mark Russinovich – Case of My Mom’s Chronically Infected PC: A classic Sysinternals investigation where Sysmon and related tools helped uncover persistent malware reinfection patterns. [URL is 404, look for episode 108 through the WayBack Machine {checked}]
License to Kill: Malware Hunting with the Sysinternals Tools (2021): In this case study, Mark Russinovich demonstrates how Sysmon’s detailed process‑creation and network‑connection telemetry exposes true behavior of a persistently compromised system that traditional antivirus repeatedly missed. By correlating Sysmon events with suspicious activity patterns, he shows how threat hunters can reconstruct attacker techniques, identify persistence mechanisms, and ultimately eradicate deeply embedded malware.

Together, these cases demonstrate Sysmon’s unique strengths: high‑fidelity process creation logging, deep visibility into network connections, precise registry and file‑system monitoring, and the ability to reconstruct causal chains that ordinary Windows logs simply cannot express. Whether used for diagnostics, security investigations, or system forensics, Sysmon remains one of the most powerful visibility tools available on Windows.

And that, dear readers, is why Sysmon is already well-regarded in Windows-World. That’s ultimately what makes it a amazing addition to the collection of built-in Windows features.

AI, Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

Catching Up Can Be Hard to Do

January 23, 2026 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

I’ll admit it. I’m lazy. When I hooked up the Lenovo ThinkCentre Neo 50q Tiny PC a couple of weeks ago, I cheated. How? By hooking up the power, networking, video, keyboard, mouse and camera that had previously been driving the ThinkStation P3 Ultra Gen 2 mini-PC. Yesterday, I had some free time so I unhooked the former and reconnected to the latter. Given the hiatus a storm of updates followed (as expected). When I checked Reliability Monitor (ReliMon) this morning, I found a couple of unexpected errors for the Lenovo TSSIOMonitor (aka Super IO Monitor). When I asked Copilot for help reading those tea leaves, its response: “Catching up can be hard, especially after a prolonged idle period.”

Why Catching Up Can Be Hard

As I look at ReliMon for yesterday afternoon, I see a steady stream of updates and installs that start at 3:38PM and run through 4:09PM (60 in all). According to Copilot, TSSIOMonitor.exe is a Lenovo executable that’s constantly monitoring hardware. Its job is to throw errors when things don’t look or work correctly.

One potential cause of the error is when sensor data is invalid. Another is when driver data doesn’t match what the monitor expects. That’s precisely what happens when chipset drivers update, ACPI tables get rebuilt, embedded controllers reinitialize, and Super I/O registers may be unstable. Basically, the monitor was using stale data to analyze a fresh situation, and erroring because of inevitable mismatches. Good to know.

Copilot Offers Insight, But I Must Assess Same

I’m getting used to asking Copilot to opine on system stuff when I need help understanding what’s going on. It certainly has more access to deep Windows arcana that I do, but I do notice occasional hiccups and hallucinations as it recites specific details. Indeed it sometimes goes off on tangents that don’t relate to my specific situation, but do play into the general circumstances and experiences around it.

This time, Copilot’s explanation makes good sense. And it helps me understand why such errors might occur when they did. It’s even comforting for it to tell me what I already knew: that a one-off or two-off error while a bunch of updates are underway isn’t terribly concerning. But we both agree that if it kept on happening (TSSIOmonitor.exe has been quiet ever since updates finished) there would be cause for concern, and possible action.

What Ronald Reagan said about nuclear arms monitoring apparently also provides to ingesting information from Copilot: “Trust, but verify.” Words to live by, here in a brave new AI-informed Windows-World.

Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

Fixing WinKey+X Menu Change

January 22, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

The Win+X menu — that little power‑user gem tucked behind the Start button — is a Windows feature you don’t think about much until it breaks. When it does, the symptoms can be maddening: missing entries, wrong icons, dead shortcuts, or menu items that don’t launch. I recently went through a repair of the Win+X system on my production desktop. That process revealed just how many layers contribute to this simple menu. Here’s a recap of how the issue was resolved in fixing WinKey+X menu change.

Getting Started: Fixing WinKey+X Menu Change

The first clue was that the Win+X menu wasn’t launching Windows Terminal correctly. Instead of opening a PowerShell or Terminal instance, it either did nothing or threw an error. That pointed to a problem in the Win+X shortcut groups. These reside beneath the user profile at:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WinX

Windows organizes these shortcuts into GroupN folders (N = 1-3). Group3 is where Terminal and PowerShell entries live. When I opened that folder, those shortcuts were either missing or pointing to stale AppX registrations. This can happen after uninstalling or repairing Windows Terminal, or some profile migration wherein AppX package identities change.

Making Shortcuts Happen…

The next step meant rebuilding shortcuts manually. Windows Terminal doesn’t include .lnk files. Hence, I created fresh ones by right‑clicking the desktop and choosing New → Shortcut, and pointing them at the program. It lives under WindowsApps and includes current version info in its actual filename.

Because Windows Terminal’s AppX path changes with every update, hard‑coding its location isn’t smart. Thus, I used the stable execution alias: wt.exe

Once the shortcut was created, I renamed it to match canonical Win+X naming conventions:
Windows Terminal.lnk Windows Terminal (Admin).lnk

Then I moved them into the Group3 folder. At this point, the shortcuts existed, but they were MIA on the menu. That’s because Win+X system caches entries and doesn’t refresh automatically. I forcibly rebuilt that cache by signing out and back in. After the next login, the menu finally displayed the new Terminal entries — but the icons were wrong.

What About Them Icons?

This led to the next discovery: Windows Terminal’s icon is stored inside its AppX manifest, not in a traditional .ico file. To fix them, I edited each shortcut’s properties and pointed the icon field to the stable Windows Terminal executable under Program Files. That exposed the correct embedded icon. Once updated, Win+X displayed the proper visuals.

The final step was cleaning up legacy entries. A repaired Microsoft Account caused Windows to resurrect old Win+X shortcuts from a now-defunct installation. Removing stale .lnk files from Group3 eliminated duplicates and restored the menu to a clean state.

By the end of the trail, Win+X worked again: correct icons, correct commands, and a clean set of shortcuts that launch reliably. The repair reinforced something I’ve seen before in Windows troubleshooting . A system often holds onto old paths, old identities, and old assumptions long after underlying components change or go away. Fixing things means understanding where Windows stores its info, and updating each layer one by one.

If your Win+X menu ever starts acting strangely, a careful rebuild of Group3 shortcuts may be exactly what brings it back to life. Here in Windows-World you can always try. It might work. And if it doesn’t, there’s always something else to try instead.

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

WinGet Weirdness Finally Whacked

January 21, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Every once in a while, Windows throws you a problem so strange, so deep in the plumbing, that you can’t help but treat it like a spelunking adventure. Over the past week, I’ve worked through one of those rare cases. Copilot ultimately helped diagnose it as a completely broken WinGet (aka Microsoft.AppInstaller) stack. Apparently, it came from corruption inside the WindowsApps directory. That’s the protected, TrustedInstaller‑owned home for all MSIX/AppX packages. I worked through a recovery process that touched ACLs, reparse points, Safe Mode, user‑level activation, and the PATH environment itself. Ultimately and fortunately, it ended with WinGet weirdness finally whacked.

Getting to WinGet Weirdness Finally Whacked

The symptoms were deceptively simple: WinGet wasn’t recognized, App Installer wouldn’t register, and the user‑level WindowsApps folder lacked key shims. Alas, the root cause was far deeper. The system‑level C:\Program Files\WindowsApps directory had partially corrupted ACLs, preventing enumeration that blocked TrustedInstaller from working. Even elevated tools couldn’t see its innards.

The breakthrough came in Safe Mode, where Windows releases some of its usual locks. Using takeown and icacls, I forcibly reclaimed ownership and permissions long enough to inspect the directory. Hundreds of previously invisible entries suddenly appeared — confirmation that the ACL choke point had finally broken open.

From there, I rebuilt the directory’s security model: restoring SYSTEM and TrustedInstaller with full control, removing inheritance, and returning ownership to TrustedInstaller. With the system-level store healthy, I exited Safe Mode (after discovering that msconfig, not BCD, was trapping the machine there) and rebooted into normal Windows.

Repairing WinGet/Microsoft.AppInstaller

Next came the App Installer repair. The system package was still resident, but user-level registration was MIA. I downloaded the official MSIX bundle, reinstalled it, and then manually re‑registered the package using its AppxManifest. That restored the user‑level WindowsApps directory and recreated the shims — including winget.exe.

But one last puzzle remained: even with the shim present, Windows still didn’t recognize the command. The culprit turned out to be the PATH. During the earlier corruption, Windows had silently dropped this critical entry:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps

Without that, no packaged app alias can resolve. Adding it back with setx, signing out, and signing back in finally brought the entire chain back to life. winget -v lit up instantly.

In the end, the repair touched nearly every layer of the Windows package‑servicing stack: NTFS ACLs, TrustedInstaller ownership, AppX registration, user‑level activation, and environment variables. It was a rare, deep, and oddly satisfying recovery — the kind of fix you document not just for others, but for the story it tells.
And now WinGet is fully operational again.

I’m celebrating the occasional “happy ending” that’s so rare in Windows-World. If you’re lucky you’ll never have cause to do likewise. But if this ever happens to you, here’s a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you out of that forest…

Cool Tools, Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog

Diving Into Recovery Media Rabbithole

January 13, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I went down a number of dead ends yesterday, trying to restore WinGet to proper operation on my Flo6 AMD desktop. One of the more interesting and frustrating alleys I banged around in involved building bootable recovery media for Windows 11. At first, I tried to get Copilot to steer me through, but found myself wandering in circles. So I turned to the built-in RecoveryDrive.exe tool. Diving into recovery media rabbithole took longer than I wanted, but gave me what I needed. I’ll explain…

Diving Into Recovery Media Rabbithole Requires Escape

Copilot had me formatting two partitions (UEFI: 1024MB; NTFS: rest of UFD), copying files, creating boot configuration data, and more. Only problem I had was that creation and management of the runtime environment ramdisk kept falling over sideways.

After my third failed attempt to create such a drive from scratch, I turned to the built-in Recovery Drive facility inside Windows 11 itself. (Visit Settings, search for “recovery drive” and it’ll take you right there.) This took a long-ish while to complete (about 45 minutes, all told). But it did what I needed it to do, and let me attempt AppX provisioning and repairs on a quiescent Windows image. That didn’t work out so well for me, but it did make it possible for me to learn some new PowerShell and Command Prompt tricks. I even got a couple of chances to dig into Safe Mode boot on my production desktop.

File layout for the Recovery Media looks like a typical Windows Setup disk (it can do that, too).

Desktop Fights Alternate Boot-ups: I Fight Back

At first, I was a bit stymied by the unwillingness of the Windows repair boot screen to field function keys (F1 for UEFI, F11 for boot menu, and so forth). But after a while, I learned how to work around those hurdles. Msconfig came in handy for getting into Safe Mode, while various flavors of the shutdown command let me access UEFI, alternate boot options, troubleshooting menus, and more.

The day was not a total loss, but it did throw me behind schedule on some project work. Today, I’m nosing the grindstone as I start to catch up. And isn’t that just the way things too often go, here in Windows-World?

Insider stuff, PowerShell, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, WED Blog, Windows 11

Primary Desktop: Something Profoundly Wrong

January 12, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’ve been fighting dragons here at Chez Tittel all day long. On my primary desktop, something profoundly wrong is dogging my steps, and docking my productivity. I can’t boot to a recovery drive to fix a relatively simple problem with application package provisioning. Behind the scenes, something is amazingly weird, and blocking my every move to try to get things fixed. Let me explain…

More About Primary Desktop: Something Profoundly Wrong

It all started with WinGet. It (Microsoft.AppInstaller) wouldn’t update properly . I went through a lengthy and trying series of misadventures (that took the best part of a full day). I only slowly determined the ed@edtittel.com account profile was thoroughly messed up.

First, I went through three iterations building a WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) bootable USB flash drive. I realized something fundamental and serious was broken. Copilot says it’s not because of any of these:

Not a bad install.
Not a missing EXE.
Not a PATH issue.
Not a system‑wide problem.

Rather, it’s a borked reparse point. It’s coupled with missing shims inside user-level WindowsApps and Winget folders.

A Wilderness of Errors

Here are some of errors I’ve fought today:

“The system cannot find the path specified”
Winget working in one account but not another
App Installer reinstall not fixing anything
PATH looking correct but still failing
Winget.exe present but nonfunctional
Commands failing instantly with no useful error text
Ephemeral pop‑ups and disappearing error dialogs

TLDR: I couldn’t build a bootable WinRE UFD that worked. I’ve switched to another PC. Now, it’s the Lenovo ThinkStation P16 Gen1. It’s frustrating… But at last a bootable UFD via the Windows 11 Download page and msconfig to get into “Safe Mode” worked. That said, I never got WinGet working on my primary MSA.

An Alexandrine Solution

I’ve now been up and down, and back and forth, over the same ground. I can’t make WinGet work in my primary login. It works fine in an alternate MSA. After spending a long, long day trying to fix this, I am throwing in the towel. I can run WinGet from the old MSA, and for now, that’s good enough for me.

Sigh. Another wasted day (at least 8 hours) here in Windows-World. Sometimes, all the effort just doesn’t produce the desired outcome. It’s a real pickle!

Insider stuff, Recent Activity, Troubleshooting, Updates, WED Blog

Manual Store Update Clears Ongoing Errors

January 5, 2026 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Here’s an interesting one. I just took a look at Reliability Monitor on one of my Canary channel test PCs (the venerable ThinkPad X12 Hybrid Tablet). As you can see in the lead-in graphic, it shows 14 days’ worth of “Warnings.” All of them mention Windows Terminal and YourPhone with a “Failed Windows Update” summary. But a manual Store update clears ongoing errors, and everything is hunky-dory now. Let me explain…

Why Manual Store Update Clears Ongoing Errors

I’m in the habit of leaving Windows Terminal open on many of my PCs. That’s because I run WinGet and other CLI utilities on them on a near-daily basis. But although this strategy is convenient, it sometimes means that Store updates won’t complete successfully because they don’t want to affect a running and related process.

Running a manual store update (Click Upates & downloads in the left column, then click the “Check for updates” button at upper right) forces the Store to interrupt things and start with a clean slate (Copilot calls this a “clean install path”). That means it restarts the Store install service, flushes any stale metadata, closes the running Terminal processes, pulls dependencies in the necessary order and forces a high-priority update job.

Thus, what’s stuck inside the automated daily update tasks that Store handles in the background is stuck no longer. The update goes through and the program shows itself running the latest version — namely, 1.23.13503.0 — without issues. And indeed, the same thing applies to Microsoft.YourPhone (showing the same error over the same period — it runs in the background automatically).

Not All Automatic Updates Always Succeed

This heading is the “moral of the story.” It emphasizes that occasional manual intervention may be needed, especially for processes that run in the background by themselves. But hey — that’s the way things go here in Windows-World sometimes. Happy New Year!