For the past year or so, my home Windows 8.1 PC wouldn’t update most of the apps. So as Microsoft has slowly improved the Music app, I’m not getting any of those benefits. Heck, the apps wouldn’t even start.
Every so often I would spend an hour or two trying to fix this, eventually giving up and hoping the inevitable Windows 10 upgrade will fix it. Last night I spent way too much time on this problem. I spent over 4 hours trying to fix it.
I spent the night Googling/Binging and trying everything I could find.
Wsreset didn’t fix it.
SFC /Scannow didn’t fix it but it did send me on a side project to figure out why that was failing. SFCFix with some sfcfix.zip file fixed that problem. My apps still wouldn’t update.
I smoked the C:WindowsSoftwareDistribution folder a few times.
AppsDiagnostic.diagcab and app.diagcab? Ran those along with WindowsUpdateDiagnostic.diagcab with no fix for the issue.
I tried a bunch of other things so let me skip ahead.
I tried uninstalling the Apps form Windows Store but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me click on the apps at all – it just showed them on the list. So I figured I would try to manually uninstall them hoping a re-install would fix them.
That brought me to this article – http://all4naija.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-to-remove-microsoft-apps-using.html
While the article says it’s for Windows 10, it worked like a champ on windows 8.1. I had the list up of my failed updates and then pecked around via PowerShell to delete them. Once I got them all uninstalled, I rebooted and went to install them again. While it took a long time, they all started installing and were working fine.
So that problem is (mostly) fixed. There are three apps still in the list that wont update. But that is a huge improvement over what I had.
My theory is that they were in Windows’ list of “installed apps” but they weren’t actually installed. So when Windows tried to install the updates, it failed because there was actually nothing to update.
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For the search-ability reasons, here are some of the errors I had and couldn’t resolve using any of the popularly recommended issues:
0x80070002
0x80070490
80246007
Event Viewer Event ID 1001
Problem signature: P1: 9600 P2: 788 P3: 115 P4: 1 P5: US P6: en-US P7: 120 P8: -2147023728 P9: Microsoft.BingFoodAndDrink_8wekyb3d8bbwe P10: 0
Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: WindowsStoreUpdateFailureV2 Response: Not available Cab Id: 0
