I have to now apologise to Microsoft. Thank you for fixing my machine.
The problem was with a driver on one of my HDD's. It in turn corrupted part of the registry. This was almost certainly due to managing to crash the computer whilst altering file path names for the drives a long time ago. The problem is now fixed.
How did I resolve this? I identified the problem was on the drive by modifying the indexing options to include or exclude various destinations. After much updating everything I could think of including the BIOS and a fresh installation of Windows (10, from
scratch), the problem persisted. So I purchased Microsoft's Premium support, Assure, for one year, and the technician remotely fixed the problem in about 3 hours.
Could I have fixed it? Possibly, but I would have to have known that the driver was corrupt on the disk drive.
I could have 'updated' the disk firmware which would have fixed the driver, without search active, and then completely reinstalled windows from a fresh image. This would have guarenteed been guaranteed to work, from what I understand. I do not know what risks
are associated with updating the disk firmware. This would have renewed the drivers and the registry, fixing the problem.
The technician's report of what he did is pasted below.
- edited the windows search components - followed this online instruction (http://www.eightforums.com/bsod-crashes-debugging/33651-crawl-could-not-completed-content-source-winrt.
html) - stopped and start the search services - run sfc /scannow - run dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth - run search and indexing troubleshooter - run hardware and device troubleshooter - run
windows update reset components - run powershell with the command below
powershell Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers |Where-Object {$_.InstallLocation -like "*SystemApps*"} | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
- restarted the pc and test the functionality of the resolution
