Windows Image Viewer crashes after a few seconds after opening

Greetings,

I'm somewhat attached to the old Windows Photo Viewer and prefer to keep using it on Win 10. Nevertheless, just today it started freezing after a few seconds. So I manage to view image 1, then "next" image 2, and then it won't move. If I just open the first image and won't use arrows to get to the next one, still the viewer will freeze. When I try to close it I get a warning asking if I want to wait or not, but waiting won't help, so I close it. It takes some seconds to finish. Restarting the system won't change the situation.

It was working last night, now it's not working anymore. I didn't install new apps, I didn't install new softwares, and there was no Win10 update from yesterday to today. Whatever happen seems to have happened out of the blue, alone by itself.

I'm now using as default the other native option, the win 10 "Photo app", but that one is working all right, whereas Windows Photo Viewer is not.

Is there any way I could fix this?

Thanks

I've used SFC and then DISM. SFC found no integrity violation, DISM stated something like "Restore Operation Successful". On that, everything seems to be OK

Nevertheless, unfortunately, the issue persists.

I've just opened Windows Photo Viewer and it froze before I could get to the 3rd image. I'm looking at it right now, there is a "(not responding)" text (I'm translating to English, my systems is not English language). The mouse cursor has an animated circle typical of "hang". It has been just like that for many minutes now and nothing happens, so I closed it. But the windows itself seems to be working (I can use other apps even while Viewer is froze).

I'm having trouble to even find the executable for this Windows Photo Viewer. Apparently when I force finishing it a rundll32.exe (status not responding) service ends as well (memory size 29.740k by the time I finished it).