All posts by Ed Tittel

Full-time freelance writer, researcher and occasional expert witness, I specialize in Windows operating systems, information security, markup languages, and Web development tools and environments. I blog for numerous Websites, still write (or revise) the occasional book, and write lots of articles, white papers, tech briefs, and so forth.

Outlook .DOCX Files Won’t Open

Here’s a pretty pickle. My most-used professional writing tool is MS Word, and I’m an Outlook user, too. A couple of days ago, I noticed that sent as attachments to Outlook .DOCX files won’t open. The first time it happened: I thought: “Corruption.” The second time, I thought: “Hmmmm. Something is up.” The third time, I KNEW “Time for Office repairs.”

Over the years I’ve written about fixing MS Office when it breaks or gets weird. You can find both 2021 and 2024 versions of such a story at ComputerWorld: 5 Steps to Repair Microsoft Office. [Note: the link is to the current version, natch.]

When Outlook .DOCX Files Won’t Open, Then What?

MS Office is a big, complex program. Occasionally it can have problems, sometimes small ones, sometimes big. To deal with such stuff MS has thoughtfully — and thankfully — built repair tools into the application installer environment.

Visit Settings > Apps > Installed Apps and look for your version of Office (in my case it’s named “Microsoft apps for enterprise – en-us”). Click on that entry, then click the Modify button. That produces the repair options presented in the lead-in graphic, with “Quick Repair” selected by default. QR uses local files to re-install and reset MS Office. Most of the time it fixes things.

This time, it did not, so I went back to that repair window and selected “Online Repair” instead. This downloads a fresh copy of all necessary files from MS servers, and does a clean re-install and reset instead. Perforce, it takes longer to do its thing (about 5-6 minutes for quick, and double that for online, on  my 2014 vintage i7 Skylake desktop).

But hey! The Online Repair worked. As soon as it completed, I opened Outlook, and grabbed the most recent message with a .DOCX attachment. This time, instead of throwing an error message saying it couldn’t read the file, it opened it up and let me get to work. Just what I was hoping would happen.

Sometimes, things in Windows-World come to a happy ending. This was such a time, and I’m glad. Huzzah!

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X380 Yoga Is Not Quite QMR-able

It’s been a long time coming, and it’s on its way out. QMR is, of course, Quick Machine Recovery. It’s a facility to let an unbootable Windows image grab a repair and fix itself, from WU or other sources. MS announced it at Ignite 2024, and it started rolling out to the Beta Channel for Windows 11 24H2 in March 2025. It showed up on my Beta test PC — a Lenovo ThinkPad X380 Yoga –earlier this week. But alas, that X380 Yoga is not quite QMR-able just yet. Let me show and tell what that means…

Why Say: X380 Yoga Is Not Quite QMR-able

Take a look at the into screen cap. Up top you see the pane from the X380 for Settings > System > Recovery > Quick machine recovery. Note above that I’ve got QRM turned on and likewise the “continue searching” option. Below, I opened WinTerm to check the status of the Windows recovery agent console (aka reagentc) to show status.

According to Copilot if QMR is available and ready to work on a Windows 11 24H2 Beta PC, one should see four entries in the reagentc /info output (all bulleted items are quoted or paraphrased):

  • Recovery Test Mode: Enabled (if test mode is active)
  • Windows RE Status: Enabled (QMR relies on WinRE)
  • Remote Remediation: Active (if QMR is configured for automatic fixes)
  • Remediation Package: Installed (if a recovery update has been applied)

If you look at the output in the screecap, it shows only item 2. That simply means WinRE itself is turned on, and able to work on the X380. None of the other QMR specific items appear, though, do they?

Turns Out There’s a Gradual Rollout, Too…

There’s a Quality Update that WU should automatically download on some Windows 11 24H2 Beta Channel PCs for testing QMR. If it’s present the PC can be induced to reboot and use the QMR facility. That package is named “Quick machine recovery update for Windows 11.” BUT it’s on a gradual rollout, as I just learned yesterday.

Alas, this update is NOT in the Update History on my X380 PC. So I still can’t take QMR for a spin. I’ll get there — soon, I hope — but not today. If you’ve got a Windows 11 24H2 Beta image at your disposal, and it’s up to date, you can check things out, too. If you find the afore-mentioned item in your update history, you can take if for a spin with these two commands in Windows Terminal:

reagentc /SetRecoveryTestmode
reagentc /BoottoRE

Then, reboot your PC and you will see QMR do its thing. That’s what I plan to try as soon as I make into the “included group” during this gradual rollout.

And ain’t that just the way things go for Windows Insiders sometimes here in Windows-World? This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that I’m behind the leading edge on a gradual rollout.

 

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Unsticking Lenovo System Update

From May 6 through 12, I had a Lenovo System update stick in WU. That is, it would attempt to install, fail, and then push a retry button at me. Alas, that meant WU wouldn’t show me any newer updates, either. At the end of this cycle KB5058496 came along. It didn’t show up in WU, either. That’s when I found myself unsticking Lenovo system update on the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga X380 where it happened. How did I do that? I ran the:

Reset_Reregister_Windows_Update_Components_for_Windows11.bat

batch file from the Eleven Forums tutorial Reset Windows Update in Windows 11. As it so often does, the Lenovo System update worked the next time I tried after said reset operation had completed and I’d rebooted that PC (as per the batch file’s own instructions). The new CU installed, and went to Build 26120.3964.

More on Unsticking Lenovo System Update

I’m not sure why the WU version got stuck, nor why it stayed that way for some time. When I looked in the Windows-Update.log file I produced via the PowerShell Get-WindowsUpdateLog cmdlet, no supporting detail told me why it happened, either.

All that Copilot could tell me was that it must be a Lenovo servicing driver update of some kind. Google was willing to speculate it might be the driver for the Lenovo Intelligent Thermal Solution. Lenovo Vantage kind of confirms this in a back-handed way, in that its history shows the latest version dated March 2024 with version number 2.1.14.0, which certainly seems to follow in the general numbering track for the item that got stuck.

So I checked Device Manager > System devices > Lenovo Intelligent Thermal Solution properties. Sure enough, the currently installed version is 2.1.52.0. Interestingly the install date shows as 4/11/2025 (same as in WU update history). That leaves me glad this already-installed driver somehow got itself unstuck. I’m still wondering why WU offered it repeatedly from 5/6-12.

These meaningless mysteries never stop in Windows-World. I’m just glad this apparently unnecessary driver offer stopped when I reset WU. Now the machine is running Build 26120.3964 and the right Intelligent Thermal Solutions driver without further issues. I’m good for now, but sure something similar will pop up soon, on one or more of my mini-fleet of 12 PCs. Stay tuned!

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Windows 10 Keeps PowerToys ComPal Error

On April 10, I blogged about how a new release of PowerToys (v0.90.1) apparently fixed a “Class not registered” error for the Command Palette from the previous version (v0.90.0). Alas, while ComPal (as I like to abbreviate this tool) is now rock-solid on my Windows 11 PCs, it’s still throwing errors after restart on my sole remaining Windows 10 desktop. That’s why my title here reads “Windows 10 Keeps PowerToys ComPal Error” — you can see the aftermath in Reiability Monitor as the lead-in screencap above.

Why Windows 10 Keeps PowerToys ComPal Error

Look at the screencap. Notice the Problem Event Name is “MoAppCrash.” This means a Modern App (aka UWP app, usually an MS Store App of some kind) has crashed. In this case it’s the PowerToys Command Palette user interface (MicrosoftCmdPal.UI.exe). Copilot says common causes include faulty, outdated app versions, corrupt system files or missing dependencies, conflicts with Windows updates, and issues with DLL files. My bets are on conflicts with Windows updates and/or issues with some DLL needed for ComPal to run.

I just tried to access ComPal on the affected Windows 10 machine. At first, it refused to respond to its shortcut (WinKey+Alt+Space) for related settings, But when I disabled, then re-enabled ComPal itself, that capability woke up and started working. So did the utility itself, without any easily discovered limitations.

What about Windows 11?

I have — and see — no such issues in Windows 11. So I’m forced to speculate that this is just a Windows 10 hiccup of some kind. Fortunately, once I disable, then re-enable ComPal, everything seems to work fine. There’s obviously some kind of minor gotcha at work, but it’s easy to get around.

Isn’t that just the way things work sometimes, here in Windows-World? Fortunately, even when the path to success isn’t automatic, or even a straight line, a small dogleg often does the trick. And so it was this morning…

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KB5058379 Forces 8GadgetPack Manuevers

On Patch Tuesday (May 13) I installed the latest updates on my PC mini-fleet (12 units right now). I didn’t reboot the Windows 10 production PC until yesterday. As soon as it came up, so did 8GadgetPack. Alas, the latter promptly crashed — and kept crashing — as I tried to bring it up. Next I realized that KB5058379 forces 8GadgetPack maneuvers, as  I tried uninstalling, then reinstalling that application.

That approach worked nicely to bring 8GadgetPack back up. Next, I performed a couple of follow-up gadget shenanigans along the same lines. That is, I had to remove individual gadgets that didn’t render on screen properly, then replace them from the Add Gadget repository. (Screen 1 from that tool serves as the lead-in graphic.) The whole exercise took about 10 minutes. And now, it’s all good.

Apparently, that update caused more havoc on other PCs. Keep reading for some of those ugly details…

KB5058379 Forces 8GadgetPack Manuevers … and More

This morning, I’m reading online that KB5058379 apparently causes other, more serious problems, too. The title of this WindowsLatest item (dated May 15) captures much of what’s amiss: Windows 10 KB5058379 locks PCs, BitLocker Recovery triggered on boot, BSODs. I guess you can say that while I got irked by having to mess about with 8GadgetPack, I’m now relieved that I didn’t have to go into full-blown troubleshooting and recovery mode yesterday instead.

In one way or another, all of these issues appear tied in some way to BitLocker issues. In the afore-linked Windows Latest story, Mayank Pamar explains a demonstrated repair strategy on some PCs. See that story for the details. The TLDR; version is “Turn off Intel TXT  in the PC’s BIOS/UEFI (may show up as “Trusted Execution” or “OS Kernel DMA Support”). This turns off BitLocker, but lets the update finish. Then you can turn it back on again.

Uninstall/reinstall or turn off/turn on seems to be the underlying theme for today’s blog post. That’s why undoing and redoing stuff remains a tried-and-true troubleshooting technique here in Windows-World, I guess!

Note added 5/16: After the next Release Preview CU, the same thing happened again with 8GadgetPack. And once again, uninstall-reinstall returned it to working order. Sigh, and sigh again. It’s looking like this may become part of my post CU recovery process. I can’t say I find that a delightful prospect, but it is a tolerable one.

 

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Rebuilding P16 Windows 11 24H2

Allrighty then: I got tired of seeing odd, unfathomable and stuck packages in the component store. That image resides on the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Mobile Workstation. So yesterday, I set about rebuilding P16 Windows 11 24H2 to come up clean. Let me explain what I did, and why I did it. The whole story shows in the lead-in graphic. It depicts the image going from 10 reclaimable packages to 2 and then to zero (0): clean! But you’ll  need keen eyes (or be unafraid to grab this screencap and make it readable.)

3 Steps To Rebuilding P16 Windows 11 24H2

STEP 1: My first step was to visit Settings > System > Recovery and then click the “Reinstall now” button to kick off an in-place upgrade repair on the P16’s suspect Windows image. For the record, it failed my “sniff test” because it kept showing 4 reclaimable packages that wouldn’t surrender to DISM /online /cleanup-image
/startcomponentcleanup.
The reinstall took about 45 minutes to complete, but required little or no effort from yours truly.

STEP 2: My second step was to run the aforementioned DISM …         /startcomponentcleanup command and see what remained. As I expected, that brought the number of reclaimable packages down from 10 to 2.

STEP 3: My March 21 blog post “Remove Package Kills Spurious Reclaimables” explains this use of a specific DISM /Remove-Package target that’s responsible for 2 spurious packages showing up in a canonical Windows 11 24H2 production image. TLDR version is: a deeply superseded package is stuck in WinSxS, but a single command removes both spurious reclaimables in one go.

The results appear in the fine print at the bottom of the lead-in screencap: a clean version of Windows 24H2 Build 26100.4061, with zero (0) reclaimables in the component store. Good-oh!

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Seeing HEIC File Explorer Thumbnails

Here’s an interesting little puzzle I stumbled across yesterday. I used a USB to Lightning cable to access my iPhone on the Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Mobile Workstation. But in looking at my photos on that device, I saw icons rather than thumbnails. And when both File Explorer Options > View > Always show icons, never thumbnails and …> Display file icon on thumbnails were unchecked, I knew I needed something else. It turns out that seeing HEIC File Explorer thumbnails requires multiple Windows extensions. Let me explain…

MS Store Visit Enables Seeing HEIC File Explorer Thumbnails

Copilot gave me an initial clue as to what was up. Turns out that HEIC is “an image container format” that adheres to the “High Efficiency Image File (HEIF)” standard. Apple adopted it for images in iOS11 and macOS High Sierra, where it’s been the default since. My first clue as to what was up came in Copilot’s statement about HEIC and Windows: ” Windows 10 (and later) supports HEIC files—though you might need to install a codec from the Microsoft Store for full compatibility…”

I checked the Store, and it turns out I already had the HEIF Image Extension installed. But in its fine print I found the following statements:

A video extension package must also be installed in order to view images that are stored in the HEIF file.

The HEVC Video Extensions package must be installed in order to view images stored in HEIF files that use the .heic, .hif or .heif file extensions.

This $0.99 item from Microsoft (!) ultimately provided the missing ingredient to let File Explorer show thumbnails (not icons) for HEIC files. This “small dig” at Apple is both irritating and amusing in that users must pay a tiny toll to more fully integrate iOS and Windows. Go figure!

One More Thing…

Before I got to the point where Explorer showed thumbnails for those HEIC files from my iPhone, I also ended up rebooting the P16. I tried opening and closing File Explorer (but didn’t restart it in Task Manager, which would have probably worked, now that I think about it) but that didn’t do the trick. That’s an indication that a more thorough restart is needed to get the HEVC extensions to kick in.

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Windows Start Soliloquy Gets Fanciful

MS has started a new design blog under the general heading of “Behind the Surface.” It’s entitled “Start, Fresh –Redesigning the Windows Start menu for you.” The “Windows Design Team” is named as the author, rather than one or more specific individuals. It’s an interesting read, if a bit too breathless and wonder-struck for me. Indeed although this Windows Start soliloquy gets fanciful and overdone, IMO, it’s still worth your perusal.

Where (and How) Windows Start Soliloquy Gets Fanciful

In a list of so-called “guiding stars” the blog states four key principles driving Start Menu design. These serve as the lead-in graphic above, so I don’t repeat them. MS makes much of the work it took to rework the Start Menu. Those efforts presumably fit into the upcoming release of Windows 11 25H2 later this year. Here’s a representative quote from the post, likely from a user interaction during that process (note the tone and diction, please):

Help me find my apps faster. Let me bend Start to fit the way I work. And please—keep the magic, don’t lose the soul.

You’ve got to read the post and check out its images, tables, and language to really make sense of what it says. The key conclusions (and design changes) should include (each bolded item below is quoted verbatim from the blog post, sans quotation marks):

  • Dynamic recommendations: “files and apps” that “surface exactly when they matter.”
  • More and better views for all apps: Repositioned at the top of the Start Menu, you can choose “between logical categories, a neat grid, or the familiar A-Z list.”
  • Mobile content, gently blended: Integration with mobile devices mentions both Android and iPhone and stresses how you can reach out from the desktop to a mobile device.
  • Personalization, elevated: Stresses user’s abilities to zoom in on, or ignore, individual Start Menu sections, and to size it to match available screen real estate (bigger on big monitors, smaller on littler ones).
  • Under-the-hood speed: A commitment to making Start an “accelerator of your day” that loads “in a snap” not “dragged by lag.:

Generally MS makes an ongoing commitment to keep listening to user input and adjusting to what users have to say. Overall their goal is to meet their mantra for what the Start Menu should be:

Everything you need, right here, ready when you are.

This Should Be Interesting…

The rah-rah nature of the blog post and its overall tone and language aside, MS is putting itself out there. In the broadest of strokes they’re promising to improve the Start Menu, and to keep making it better. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in upcoming Insider Preview releases — and ultimately, in 25H2 itself. I’ll be watching — and sharing my observations — along that path. So will lots of other Insiders and other users. Stay tuned!

Note: here’s a shout out to Sergey Tkachenko at WinAero.com, whose story this morning pointed me at the MS blog post. Thanks! For a vastly different take on what’s going on here, see what Paul Thurrott has to say about this blog post.

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Copilot PowerShell Scripting Improves

Hopefully, the observation that Copilot PowerShell scripting improves — and keeps improving over time — is noteworthy. And I mean outside a small circle of Windows nerds. From September through November of 2023, I wrote a series of stories about customizing Windows Terminal and PowerShell for TekkiGurus. As part of my research I used Copilot to help me build a raft of PS scripts. They served to read and write files, including JSON for profiles and configurations, counting text items, and more. That provides my basis for comparison between then and now. That experience grounds my assertion that Copilot has indeed gotten better at this. Let me explain…

What Copilot PowerShell Scripting Improves Means

In 2023, most of Copilot’s scripts of more than 2 or 3 lines of Powershell failed out of the box. All  suffered from minor syntax errors. Some included outright mistakes or errors. That said, they were close enough to the marks I was trying to hit to be helpful. I could debug and get them running properly, doing what I wanted them to, in an hour or two. That’s good, but by no means as magical as I might like.

Things are different now. Yesterday, for example, I learned that UniGetUI can save a complete list of all installed packages on a PC in file format. Upon examination, that format proves to be plain-text JSON, designed to be both compact and easy for humans and PCs to parse and ingest. “Great,” I thought, “If I can count the number of packages in that file, it will also tell me how many packages I have installed on the PC whence it’s generated.”

Indeed, I asked Copilot to generate a PS script to count the number of instances of “Name” in that file (each package has one such field). I took the resulting PowerShell and ran it, and it worked on the first try. You can see those results in the lead-in graphic for this blog post, at the top of the output (a whopping 454 of them, in fact). I’m tickled to death that I got the info I wanted without having to debug anything.

Where (and How) Copilot Still Falls Short

Ideally, an AI amanuensis could take this effort a step further. I should be able to ask Copilot: “How many packages are installed on my PC?” and get the same answer. Right now, it tells me how to get that answer via various PowerShell sources that include WinGet, the MS Store, and Win32 applications. We’re not quite where I want AI to be just yet.

One more thing: I asked Copilot to tell me when I wrote the TekkiGurus series of stories about Windows Terminal and it couldn’t tell me. For AI to work the way I want it to — and I think most readers could agree that it would be immensely helpful for that to happen — it would look up the initial Wayback Machine link, read the pub date, then follow the links in that story to other four elements in that 5-part series. It could then compile the full list of dates and titles and tell me what  I needed to know. Alas, not yet.

IMO, humans should drive AI to set tasks for it to handle and complete. AI should use its smarts to figure out how to get this done, and then to do it. Right now, it seems ready to tell me how to do it, and then do it for myself. But that’s not really the way it should work. Hopefully, we’ll be able to take that next step sooner, rather than later, in turning AI into a real assistant and amanuensis, and less of an advisor or source of guidance. In the months and years ahead, we will surely find that out!

 

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Interesting UniGetUI Update Shenanigans

I have to laugh. I read yesterday on NeoWin that UniGetUI — Marti Climent’s excellent UI skin for WinGet, Scoop, Chocolatey and other package managers — had gotten a big update. So naturally, I wanted to try it out. Instead, I got tangled up in some  interesting UniGetUI update shenanigans. They were almost entirely of my own making, but worth explaining. Here goes…

Revealing Interesting UniGetUI Update Shenanigans

I’ve actually had UniGetUI installed on my PC since the days when it was named WinGetUI. And indeed, I’d gone through several beta versions of UniGetUI. Amusingly, some launched from the old name (WinGetUI) but showed up with the new one (UniGetUI).

Somewhere in that skein of releases, the package names or IDs got tangled up. When I ran the new version of UniGetUI, it showed me an older beta version needed updating. Thus, I used the newest UniGetUI to uninstall that same older beta. Imagine my surprise when the PC came back with no version(s) of either WinGetUI or UniGetUI installed. Somehow, the beta uninstaller ended up doing away with everything WinGet or UniGet UI related on that PC and I was left with nothing.

Sometimes, Nothing Is Good

Neither Settings > Apps > Installed apps, nor Revo Uninstaller showed me anything related to WinGetUI or UniGetUI on my PC. So at least, I had a clean slate left behind. That made my job easy: I went to the Latest Release (v3.2.0) on the UniGetUI GitHub page, downloaded UniGetUIInstaller.exe and had at it.

Everything is now working, and the newest version — as you can see from the About info in the lead-in graphic — is working. It even managed to update TeamViewer for me, despite the older WinGetUI failing at that task before I started this adventure.

Sure enough, it’s always something, here in Windows-World. I’m just glad when a fix or workaround presents itself to me with little effort. This was one of those rare and happy times … I’m grateful.

 

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