I am having some issues with File Explorer. Ever since I uninstalled the Virtual Machine Platform, I cannot open any folder in File Explorer—it freezes, and then I have to either kill it with the "End Process" popup, or it resets explorer.exe on its own. I also get the following odd behaviors:
Several "The Windows Search service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this x time(s)." in the Event Viewer, always followed by:
"The Windows Search service terminated with the following error:
File exists."
Until now, at which point the second error has been replaced with "Access is denied" instead of "File exists" (more details in the steps I've taken below).I would get the following message at startup or when I first tried to open File Explorer (no rhyme or reason to which, as far as I could tell).
I tried working through it through live support, and Hussen was very helpful, but we weren't able to fix it before I had to sign off for the night. Here is the full list of steps I've tried, more or less in order:
DISM
SFC
Reinstalling Virtual Machine Platform.
With help from Hussen in live support:
Restarting Explorer.
Reinstalling Windows 11 with the "Keep my apps and files" option.
Removing all CrossDevice*.* files from C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\MicrosoftWindows.CrossDevice_1.24012.117.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy\ and re-running DISM (after making backups of those files).
Changing the permissions of the C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\MicrosoftWindows.CrossDevice_1.24012.117.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy\ directory using Cygwin when DISM didn't replace those files and I couldn't copy them back normally, even with admin privileges (which I now realize is probably because the DLLs are in use).
Manually changing the ACL using the following commands. This worked now (though it didn't last night), but I can't
cd "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\MicrosoftWindows.CrossDevice_1.24012.117.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy\"
$ACL = Get-Acl -Path .\
$AccR = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule(<My_Username>, "Modify", "Allow")
$ACL.SetAccessRule($AccR)
Set-Acl "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\MicrosoftWindows.CrossDevice_1.24012.117.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy\"I have seemed to start getting different errors—now, instead of the popup error I get above, I get the following issue instead:
Here is my system information:
OS: Windows 11 Home (10.0.22631 Build 22631)
PC: Lenovo Legion Slim 5 (Model 82Y9)
RAM: 32 GB (2x 16 GB DDR5-5600 SODIMM)
Antivirus: Avira Antivirus
What should I do at this point? This all seems to be something that corrupted itself when I tried uninstalling the Virtual Machine Platform (since VBS was having a negative effect on my system performance and seemed to be blocking a DLL that I need—keyman.dll—due to it not being a recognized Microsoft-Signed DLL), but as I noted above, the I would really prefer to avoid a complete system reset, especially if that would screw up the custom group policies I've applied, but I don't have any Restore Points set up, either.
SFC and DISM didn't even restore the CrossService.* files that I removed, it just created empty ones. How would I go about getting those fixed?
