Windows Applications not opening, showing Chinese gibberish instead.

sans · 11 Jan 2019

PolarNettles said:

That is actually an improperly-encoded HTML file. There are some extra bytes at the beginning.

Code:

ÿþï»¿<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge">
    <style type="text/css">
...

This looks like a Windows message that somehow got corrupted:

Code:

SmartScreen couldn't verify this file
         Are you sure you want to run this software?
                                                                Publisher:
                         Unknown Publisher

                         App:

BTW, how did you figure it was improperly-encoded HTML?

PolarNettles · 11 Jan 2019

Turns out that the encoding problem is due to an extra UTF-16 byte-order mark even though the file is UTF-8. I have no idea how it could have gotten there.

I would start with a system file check: Run SFC Command in Windows 10 | Tutorials

sans · 11 Jan 2019

PolarNettles said:

Turns out that the encoding problem is due to an extra UTF-16 byte-order mark even though the file is UTF-8. I have no idea how it could have gotten there.

I would start with a system file check: Run SFC Command in Windows 10 | Tutorials

Alright. I'm running the SFC scan on my laptop now. I'll reply once it finishes.

PolarNettles · 11 Jan 2019

sans said:

BTW, how did you figure it was improperly-encoded HTML?

I copy-pasted the text into a file and opened it in a hex editor:

Windows Applications not opening, showing Chinese gibberish instead.-image.png

sans · 11 Jan 2019

PolarNettles said:

I copy-pasted the text into a file and opened it in a hex editor:

I feel dumb for not trying thru a hex editor and trying thru Notepad++

sans · 11 Jan 2019

sans said:

Alright. I'm running the SFC scan on my laptop now. I'll reply once it finishes.

My laptop finished the SFC scan.
Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files and successfully repaired them.
For online repairs, details are included in the CBS log file located at windir\Logs\CBS\CBS.log. For example C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log.
For offline repairs, details are included in the log file provided by the /OFFLOGFILE flag.

CountMike · 11 Jan 2019

You might want to run this too.
dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup /ResetBase and SFC /scannow again after a restart.