Re-installing Cortana

I recently had a session weeding out old programs from my PC, and in the process made copious use of CCleaner to clean up the registry and get rid of all the junk.

All went well, and my PC is running nice and quick, however, today I noticed that Cortana is absent from the task bar. Right clicking on the task bar gives me the option of showing the search icon (not Cortana) and if I do this, the search button does nothing. Similarly, I can find an entry for Cortana in the all apps listing on the start menu, but clicking it does nothing. If I do a search for Cortana in the search menu, it brings up an entry for "Cortana & Search Settings System Settings" but again, clicking this does nothing.

I'm not a great believer in co-incidences, so suspect that at some point during my great clean up excercise, I have somehow managed to remove some or all of Cortana from the PC. So, does anyone here know if there is a way of re-installing or repairing Cortana short of doing a re-install of Windows?

Cheers,

Cliff

Teflon said:

I recently had a session weeding out old programs from my PC, and in the process made copious use of CCleaner to clean up the registry and get rid of all the junk.

All went well, and my PC is running nice and quick, however, today I noticed that Cortana is absent from the task bar. Right clicking on the task bar gives me the option of showing the search icon (not Cortana) and if I do this, the search button does nothing. Similarly, I can find an entry for Cortana in the all apps listing on the start menu, but clicking it does nothing. If I do a search for Cortana in the search menu, it brings up an entry for "Cortana & Search Settings System Settings" but again, clicking this does nothing.

I'm not a great believer in co-incidences, so suspect that at some point during my great clean up excercise, I have somehow managed to remove some or all of Cortana from the PC. So, does anyone here know if there is a way of re-installing or repairing Cortana short of doing a re-install of Windows?

Cheers,

Cliff

Sounds very similar if not the same to my post. Thing is I didn't use Ccleaner at the time it disappeared. I did after Cortana stopped responding and existing.

Build 10240. On my main user profile Cortana is just unresponsive. The first night she was working fine now she sits in the task-bar, but it shows no mic option and it shows Search the web and Windows, instead of Ask me anything. Neither does the live tile do anything or respond when left-clicked, it just wont open. Lastly when I go into settings and get to the Cortana & Search settings and click the option it brings me back to the initial page of the settings instead. Inside of my task-bar when I right-click its supposed to have a Cortana section where you can hide, show Cortana icon, or show search box. Instead the menu is labeled Search to get to those options. It says show search icon instead of Cortana. Its like she is gone and no trace.

I suspect something may have broke in the registry. I've tried Powershell > Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocati
on)\AppXManifest.xml"} and it fixes tile and start menu issues, but not Cortana.

I also tried an elevated cmd and ran gpedit.msc Computer Configuration>Administrative Template>Windows Components>Search> and enabled Allow Cortana and Allow search and Cortana to use location. Initially they were off. Enabling them and rebooting didn't make a difference to anything though.

Cortana works fine in my other user profiles. Here I can compare with screenshots.

Primary profile
Attachment 26353

Secondary profile
Attachment 26358

Also notice the difference in the actual bar. No mic and no Ask me anything. Unresponsive when clicked. Any suggestions?

If you were to create a new user profile or log into an another existing one does it work?

You're right - it does sound like the same issue - perhaps it isn't related to my use of CCleaner afterall then. Like you, I only get the option of having "search" on the toolbar (not Cortana) and I cannot access any settings relating to Cortana. It's as if Cortana has been wiped from the system.

I logged in as my wife to try another user account and that did not solve the issue, although it did create another amusing game, as it re-sized all my startup tiles to large and mixed all the groups up - lots of fun! I am now back in my own account, having re-sized and re-arranged all start menu icons (the change carried over to my account) and find that the keys for @ and " have been swapped over. Oh how happy am I!

Cliff

Thanks to some useful info provided by Forum user Cliff S, my PC is now fixed!


The issue was linked to location services, which need to be set to "on" in the Action Centre. When I attempted to do this, I found the option was greyed out, which lead to looking at which services were currently running (via "Services.msc"). It transpired that "Geolocation service" was disabled, and I was unable to restart it. A bit of Googling took me to an MS support site, which said this was a known issue with Win 10:


"Geolocation

After disabling the Geolocation Service by changing startup type to Disabled, attempts to re-enable it will fail with an error message. As the Geolocation Service can no longer be started, Geolocation will remain disabled on the device and prevent location based functionality from working. To work around this issue, manually delete the following regkey using regedit: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lfsvc\TriggerInfo\3."


I edited the registry as described, and sure enough, after a re-boot, the Geolocation service could then be started. I opened MS Config, and made sure it was set to run at startup, re-booted again, and once Win 10 had started up, my "Location" button was live, along with an all singing and dancing Cortana.


Hopefully, this may help anyone else who may have a similar issue.


Cheers,


Cliff

Thanks, glad I found this. But I have no idea how 'location' became disabled, as was the Geolocation service.