Windows Store is missing and I can't reinstall it

Hello, All,

I have a Dell 5748 laptop, which I purchased in late 2014 with Windows 8.1. About 8 months ago, I upgraded it to Windows 10 using the free upgrade offered by Microsoft. Everything updated fine, the new apps all worked fine and life was good. The current Windows version is build 10586.164.

Subsequently, the Calculator app stopped working. It would open, but an attempt to press any key would cause it to close, or it would close on its own. After spending many hours trying to resolve this, I went to the Store and downloaded another calculator, which worked fine until recently.

Most recently, the new downloaded calculator started acting the same way. Going into the store, I found that I had 22 updates to a variety of apps that would not download. When I manually released them, they would start to install, displaying:

- Acquiring License
- Downloading
- Installing

As the status bar neared the right, it would seem to stop near the 85% area. After a long delay, I would get an error that either said "Try that again" or "Give us a few minutes". There were three different error codes from the 22 app updates. "Try that again" errors resulted in either 0x80073CF0 or 0x80070490. "Give us a few minute errors" resulted in 0x80246007 errors.

If I entered the Store, it would not download other apps, running for a while and then giving one of the above error messages. The Store started closing on its own without reason. I tried numerous suggestions from my internet research, including resetting the Store, and one of those involved uninstalling and reinstalling the Store application via PowerShell. It uninstalled fine, but would not reinstall, so now I have no Store.

Please note that Windows 10 updates automatically and without difficulty. Running SFC results in no issues found. An attempt to replace the image as Adminstrator found two problems which were corrected, but this still didn't help.

My attempt to reinstall the preinstalled apps results in the following error. (I captured it as an image so I am retyping it here, just in case I make an error...):

Add-AppxPackage : Deployment failed with HRESULT: 0x80073CF6, Package could not be registered.
error 0x80070490: Cannot process the Microsoft.WindowsCalculator_10.1601.49020.0_X64__8wekyb3d8bbwe package because the following error was encountered while retrieving the 1 property for the value 'ms-resource:AppStoreName': Element not found.

I have tried restoring to a previous restore point, but this did not help.

I could reset Windows, but since the Office applications came preinstalled with Windows 8.1, I am not sure what kind of issues I will have with reinstalling them, so have avoided this so far. Plus, the problem seems so esoteric that I am not sure this would fix it. I have reviewed many of the posts on the Store subject here, and have tried most of them.

So I am at a loss as to my next step, and thought I would ask for expert help. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Charlie

Hi, Mike,

Thank you for the reply. I will try a repair install, as you suggest.

Thank you also for the suggestion on the complete image backup. I will definitely do that once I get the system working correctly. I have a few questions about what the image contains, but that is secondary to fixing the problem and I can always ask those later...

Thanks,
Charlie

Hi, Mike,

Re the image, Perfect! That's what I was hoping.

Thanks,
Charlie

Mike,

Many thanks for all your help... the Repair Update worked and solved all the issues with the Windows Store! Now to make an image backup...

Thanks again,
Charlie

Hi, Mike and any others...

As I stated above, I successfully resolved my issues by doing a Windows 10 Repair Update, as described in the documents here on the Ten Forums. BUT I stupidly ran the update from my Download folder, which is where the Windows 10 ISO file downloaded to. I guess I was assuming that this file would not actually be used to RUN Windows. When I tried to delete it, I found it was in use. So... except for repeating the Windows 10 update from a different folder, is there a way to move this file? If not, I'll leave it in downloads with a note to myself that it has to stay there.

Thanks,
Charlie