Jacee said:
Have you experienced any Windows update failures? You do have corrupted files.......
Jacee:

No. There were no Windows Update failures. I was in the process of subscribing to the Windows Insider Preview and I downloaded the latest beta version Build of Windows because at that time there was an MS Store application that I wanted to install that required a newer Build number (it was Build 19680 - or something like that; cannot quite remember) and so I thought I had to install that beta version Windows 10 update. But it was not the case; the developer changed it when I went back to the MS Store and I was able to install it without the beta version installed.

Yes. I know I have corrupted and I fixed that, I think...read below.



dalchina said:
Please proceed from 'First do some...'
I did and I wanted to give some time before I jinxed my accomplishments...

I also looked at Portable HD Tune 2.5 and it was a simple hard drive checker (I use Seagate drives and ran Seagate Tools and the drives were healthy and fine). However, this was the first thing I did was to make sure all of my Seagate drives (I have a 1TB [internal - main drive], and an external 4TB and 8TB HDDs) were healthy; they were according to Auslogics' BoostSpeed 11...

I did an offline run chkdsk C: /scan and it did not find any errors within the Windows directory only found some corrupt links to other files but did not have the outcome I was hoping for.

Lastly,I did reinstall the May 2019 Windows 10 (1903 Build 18362.1) which took about 4~5 hours (like I knew it would) and "knock on wood" that seemed to fix my problem ...


NOTE: Now I do not know if this was my issue or not, but within my research, I had stumbled across a forums post from Microsoft Forums and a user pointed out (which I thought was interesting so I am re-posting here) that the SYSTEM32 DPAPI.dll has a sister file within the SYSWOW64 directory under Windows. This Bad Image error message popup does NOT distinguish between the two DPAPI.dll files (incidentally the x64 DPAPI.dll file is 13kb while the x32 DPAPI.dll file is 15.5kb); if one or both of them are corrupted (usually meaning a "zero byte" file - according to the Microsoft Moderator who responded) this message comes up frequently, FYI...


I would like to take the time to Thank You for all who helped resolve my issue (I guess over time we shall see if it stays resolved)...

Only time will tell...

Cheers!