Category Archives: WED Blog

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 Copilot says common causes include faulty, outdated app versions, corrupt system files or missing dependencies, conflicts with Windows updates, and issues with DLL files.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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Chasing Intel esrv_svc.exe

Looking over my various Windows PCs and Reliability Monitor reports after a week away, I stumbled across an interesting — but not unexpected — APPCRASH. It’s got me chasing Intel esrv_svc.exe, to learn what it does, and see whether or not it’s serious. TLDR version: runs various Intel update facilities; no, it’s not.

Where Chasing Intel esrv_svc.exe Takes Me

According to MS Answers,  esrv_svc.exe is related to a bunch of different Intel update checks, including:

  • Intel Driver Update Utility
  • Intel System Usage Report
  • Intel Energy Checker
  • Some of the Intel PROSet Wireless Software
  • Sony VaioCare

The error itself is tied to item number 2 (but that shows up only on the initial ReliMon report page as “Intel(R) System Usage Report”). That said, I also use the drive update utility (as part of Intel Driver and Support Assistant, aka Intel DSA) and the PROSet Wireless software (on most of my Lenovo laptops, in fact). I couldn’t have run  DSA on or around the error date of 5/2/2025, because we were out of town. So it was some kind of scheduled task, running on its own.

FWIW, Reddit also ties this kind of error to the Intel telemetry program (aka Intel Computing Improvement Program, which scrapes and sends Intel-related event info back to the company for capture and analysis).

Is There Cause for Concern?

AFAIK, despite this APPCRASH error, there’s no cause for concern around this executable. It’s involved in managing communications with Intel. Such to-and-fro appears to be either update- or event-related and not critical to proper PC operation. I’m going to follow Elsa’s lead from Frozen  and just “let it go” into the great bit bucket beyond the confines of the cozy little world here at Chez Tittel.

Here in Windows-World, it’s good to let go when you can. I’ll concentrate on stuff that poses real problems or indicates actual trouble of some kind. This one looks like just another hiccup to me. Plenty of those around here, for sure!

 

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OhMyPosh Upgrade Needs WinGet DB Reset

Something interesting just popped up in Windows Terminal. Literally. Upon starting Windows Terminal, I got a notification from OhMyPosh that it was updating to the latest version: 25.21.0. So I closed WinTerm and re-opened it to run WinGet upgrade –all — include-unknown. As you can see in the intro screenshot, WinGet went ahead and updated OMP again anyway. When I asked Copilot why this happened, it explained that an OhMyPosh upgrade needs WinGet DB reset so it is forced to rescan all currently installed packages. A restart makes that happen automatically, BTW.

Why OhMyPosh Upgrade Needs WinGet DB Reset

When Windows Terminal has been up and running already, WinGet doesn’t refresh its current package data through a simple open/close operation. Instead, users must run the following WinGet command to force that to occur (again, a restart has the same effect):

winget source reset --name winget --force

This tells WinGet to rebuild its list of local (that is, currently installed) packages. After that running an update check won’t show OhMyPosh in need of updating anymore. I checked this out on another test PC and indeed this approach works. Good to know!

ICMYI: A Quick Intro to OhMyPosh

Many readers will recognize OhMyPosh (OMP) as “the way” to snazz up the command line in Windows Terminal/PowerShell. For an inkling of what this looks like using developer Jan De Dobbeleer’s own unique theme, look at the top and bottom of the intro graphic. It shows glyphs for (from left to right):

  • the current login account (ed) and folder icon
  • execution time for most recent command (0 ms)
  • battery status (power connector against green means “good”)
  • current environment = PowerShell (pwsh)
  • current time = 10:33:08 (time of screen capture)

The last two items in the preceding list show up at right, the first three at left, on the command line. For all items shown, and a whole bunch more OMP offers users a plethora of themes. It also provides good documentation and “source code” (JSON markup, actually) for all of them. Users can even create their own custom themes. I’ve written an intro and how-to story about OMP for TekkiGurus, but that site is now defunct. Find it via this WayBack Machine link. Enjoy!

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Dev Home Leaving Soon

I’ve been away on a family trip to Boston. Upon returning to my desk this morning, WinGet brought a Dev Home update to the Lenovo P16 Mobile Workstation (see lead-in graphic). “Hmmmm,” I thought, “Isn’t Dev Home leaving soon?” Indeed it is, as per MS Learn as you can see in the next screencap.

With Dev Home Leaving Soon, What’s Next?

Good question! In the afore-linked MS Learn item, MS announced last January that Dev Home would be discontinued in May, 2025. I’ve been “staying tuned” for more info since then, but so far such info has not been forthcoming.

Well: May is here and I still can’t find anything new about Dev Home’s impending retirement. Ditto for which features will be preserved and where within Windows they’ll show up. Of the tools that Dev Home brings to the Windows party, these are the ones about which I’m most curious:

1. Support for ReFS volume creation in Windows 10 and 11.
2. GitHub connection with repos for access to tools and packages.
3. The Hosts File Editor and Registry File Editor utilities.
4. Consolidated view of development projects via its dashboard.

In January, MS dropped the first shoe to warn developers (and other interested parties) that Dev Home would be yanked in May 2025. Now that it’s May, the silence while waiting for that next shoe is nearly deafening. All I can say is: “Please give us a clue or two, Microsoft: where are the best bits of Dev Home going to wind up?”

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