Greetings, as of recently I have encountered an issue that has damaged my installation of Windows multiple times, both in Windows 10 and 11.
This started happening when I installed State of Decay 2 from the Xbox store via Game Pass. This specific game cannot be installed in the "Xbox Games" folder, but instead a warning appears informing that "it will be installed with other Windows app in a secure folder" or something like that. It seemed odd but didn't think much about it. After that, I ran the game, which crashed and caused a BSOD.
After the PC restarted, when logging into the desktop, everything was flickering and it was impossible to use.
Looking up for solution there where many like using SFC, DSIM, CHKDSK, etc. I tried everything and nothing work. Only entering into safe mode I could use CMD to try this solutions.
After a lot of attempts, I finally decided to reinstall Windows. This solved the problem.
However, after reinstalling all my programs, the same Windows corruption happened after using the Xbox app and restarting the computer.
Looking up for solutions again, I saw that it was recommended to upgrade into Windows 11, so I did. After several hours, yet again, I reinstalled all my programs, and everything seemed to work. Restarting the PC caused no issues, until I use the Xbox app in a later day.
The next time I started my PC, the taskbar didn't worked, File Explorer couldn't open files, etc
The Windows installation was corrupted again.
I retried every solution this time on Windows 11 to no avail, nothing worked, forcing me to reinstall Windows again.
Finally, I did a final test trying to pin down what was the cause of the issue. After the clean install of Windows, I immediately installed Unreal Engine with the required Visual Studio, tested it with several projects and everything worked perfectly.
Then I opened the Xbox app, which always asks for permissions for a required component called "Gaming Services" or something like that. Since I suspected this was the issue, I restarted the PC, and lo and behold, Windows was corrupted yet again.
I'm pretty confident that the issue is caused by Unreal Engine/Visual Studio and the Xbox app having some compatibility issue, which somehow ends up corrupting Windows.
The only solution I have is simply not using the Xbox app (in which I had GamePass) in order to keep working with Unreal Engine.
Sorry this is such a long post, but I gave as much detail as possible.
If someone has any ideas on how to fix this, I would be very grateful. If not, at least maybe this can help someone else going mad as I did and point them in the right direction (which at the moment is surrendering).
Cheers!