A user brought me a laptop. Programs and Features shows 116 things installed, some I recognize and some I don't, many of them are obscure media handlers which probably came with bloatware; any of which might be causing a conflict of some sort. It is running Windows 10 Pro, 1703 x86 15063.504. It seems that the entire appx subsystem has gone nuts. Specific symptoms include: - Start menu: right click anything, or click the power or user bubbles, the popup appears and instantly disappears. - Cortana: the "Type here to search" field flickers and you have to click in it multiple times and pound the keyboard to get it to search anything. - Notifications: click it, the notifications bar slides out then instantly slides back. - Network, sound, battery, clock, basically any of the UWPs on the right side of the taskbar, click them, the expected thing pops up but disappears instantly. - Store and other UWP apps: any text entry field flickers or is untypeable; window borders, size controls and taskbar icon flicker; items with popup menus appear then disappear instantly. This has persisted through sfc, dism restorehealth, upgrade reinstall from iso image, the SoftwareRepairTool and startmenu troubleshooter. However, I swapped the SSD with another and did a clean install, everything works perfectly so it is not a hardware issue, it is something in this particular image. Short of doing a "Reset this PC" keeping the user's files but forcing them to reinstall everything else, what else can be tried to troubleshoot this issue?
Have you checked if the system has the latest BIOS update? It can be very annoying sometimes when you find out that Setup is responsible for such factors.
I will admit that is one thing I have not checked, so I will check it now. But since a clean install works perfectly that should not, in theory, have anything to do with it. Interestingly, the settings app seems unaffected. I forgot to mention that at first.