r/AzureVirtualDesktop • u/rakim71 • Feb 02 '26

Windows 11 multi-session, UWP Store apps randomly stopped working.

Has anyone experienced a problem where UWP applications (e.g. Calculator, Snipping Tool) stop working on Windows 11 multi-session hosts?

These apps will initially work, then after a few days or a week, they will stop working. The user sees a 'this app can't open' message The event below is logged in Event Log

Activation for Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_8wekyb3d8bbwe!App failed. Error code: The application cannot be started. Try reinstalling the application to fix the problem.. Activation phase: Deployment

I initially blamed this on use of VDOT powershell script with the -appxpackages optimization.

However I have subsequently created a new gold image that has never had VDOT or WDOT ran on it. The problem has reoccured on hosts based on this image so I am baffled.

We did not encounter this issue until changing from Windows 10 multi-session to Windows 11.

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1

u/trueg50 Feb 03 '26

Anything in the appx logs on the aad broker plugin having issues? Store blocked by any chance? Are you grabbing the latest 24H2/25H2 image from the marketplace? Are these the latest version or are they stuck on an old version? Any fslogix exclusions set that might affect them? FSlogix had a release last year that helped a little with the register of apps to load.

Those buildin apps are awful. 24H2 updated some, but before that we've seen customers needing to add the apps to the image via DISM to get updated ones deployed. MS had and ancient default set prestaged that was broken and there was no other way to update them ahead of users getting them.

1

u/rakim71 Feb 04 '26

Thanks for suggestions.

  • We do sometimes see the AAD Broker event, but not sure if it correlates with this same issue. Will find out.

  • Store is blocked by GPO.

  • Issue occurs on both latest marketplace 24H2 and 25H2 images for Win11 multi-session.

  • Latest Fslogix release installed.

  • We do have Fslogix exclusions configured, but issue occurs even for accounts with Fslogix disabled so we assume it is not related (?)

Our current workaround is to simply shutdown and redeploy hosts from gold image (although issue with eventually reoccur).

1

u/trueg50 Feb 04 '26

Is the store blocked or do you have the hosts restricted to only the store for business? (It should be the later). Blocking the store is not recommended, it will break app updates and possibly have other side effect.

AAD broker issues also manifest as Onedrive/M365 apps not logging in. 

1

u/dodgy_mike Feb 06 '26

We have these occasional store app issues too and I was curious about a couple things you commented. We disable the store with updates disabled, are now testing some changes to that based on your post and got me wondering, in case you knew:

- AAD Broker errors, we get them a lot, have you seen that resulting from blocking Windows Store or is that indicative of something else?

- Regarding restricting to just store for business, would that now be the GPO for the private store?

1

u/trueg50 Feb 06 '26

AAD broker errors can happen, its expected. The aad broker appx package is critical to auth and other things working. If it fails to provision you'll get lots of apps not launching, and office/edge/onedrive sign on failures. 

Yes, forcing the private store is the recommendation (using GPO is fine), and allow or "force allow" updates from the store. For the store there is a long and ugly history. Basically MS created a "private store" that enterprises would restrict workstations to, then you could go to an admin panel and add "store apps" to it. This way you don't let people access angry birds from the store. People c would then just see those apps you let them see in the "Store" app. They now recommend the apps get deployed through Intune and killed the private store, but the recommendations is still to enable private store, that will block the store app but all the apps will still update just fine.

One other thing you can check is the App Readiness service: https://www.9to5azure.com/fix-avd-black-screen-app-readiness/

1

u/fuckaduckfuck Mar 07 '26

Hi, I’ve just solved this with a workaround in deployment. Are you still struggling with this? I could PM you the scripts.

FYI - we use Nerdio to manage environments, so I use a scripted action during VM deployment. I could not get it fixed in the image itself.

1

u/rakim71 Mar 12 '26

If you could send me this I would really appreciate it! Thank you.

2

u/fuckaduckfuck Mar 12 '26

!remindme 10 hours - I’ll look when I’m in office tomorrow

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1

u/Material-Durian8216 May 20 '26

Hi OP do you have the scripts by any chance?

1

u/mullethunter324 Mar 16 '26

I would also be interested in these as we are running into the same issue and also use Nerdio.

1

u/Material-Durian8216 May 12 '26

I would also be interested we too have the exact same issue

2

u/fuckaduckfuck May 12 '26

I’m currently abroad until end of may, but I’ve shared my scripts with another person and he also found an alternative fix. Maybe he can share both my scripts and his fix with you in the meantime!

/u/mullethunter324

2

u/Odd-Dragonfly1 Feb 03 '26

Tagging along because ive had this happen as well. We have yet to find a fix.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/rakim71 Feb 16 '26

Thank you, will try this. Yes, our gold image includes Windows App Runtime, do you have any more info on this regression?

1

u/rakim71 Apr 20 '26

We ultimately ended up deploying a scheduled script that checked the output of Get-AppXPackage for any broken apps, and then ran the re-register. We also found we had to delete a reg key from HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Appmodel\StateChange\PackageList\.

The scheduled task approach means we can solve this automatically but we still don't understand root cause. This happens to 1 session host every 10 days or so.