Cortana won't index apps except those pre-installed on my laptop

If I search for a desktop application or a Windows app in Cortana, Cortana won't find it unless it is one of the ones that came pre-installed on my machine.

I have seen reports of similar problems from 2015 which were apparently fixed by a Windows update, but I am already many updates beyond that. I have also followed the instructions here involving the command

Code:

Get-AppXPackage -Name Microsoft.Windows.Cortana | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

but this didn't help. Any ideas?

Thanks for replying.

No, I haven't touched the search indexing options. Examples of searches that fail are "affinity", which ought to find Affinity Photo, and "sketchable", which ought to find the Windows Store app of the same name. However "skype" and "notepad" both work, these having been preinstalled by the manufacturer.

Yes, Cortana indexes my files and folders just fine. The programs I am looking for do appear in the Start menu and that command you gave me says there are about 220 items there, which sounds about right. That page at the Microsoft forum seems to describe my issue exactly. The build is 14393.693.

I couldn't disable start menu searching in indexing options, but I did try to delete the registry keys suggested. However I was not able to do this as administrator. Apparently I need to be logged in as system. I tried using psexec.exe from Sysinternals, but that didn't work. I submitted the link for the alternative registry editor mentioned in the instructions to Virustotal and got some positives. So I'm a bit nervous about continuing trying to delete those registry keys.

That said, I have discovered that the start menu searching is only broken for one particular user. When I log in as a different user I can find all the applications in the Start menu. This suggests that the indexing itself works. I am wondering whether the problem is connected to me having renamed my user folder (from the name automatically generated by Windows to one that is more meaningful for sharing on my local network). That said, I've had no other problems that I've noticed related to changing the name of my user folder.

I finally worked out how to delete the registry entries (right click on the key and change the permissions for system), but they didn't regenerate properly. Whereas before there were many entries in each subkey, now there were only two in each. So I have restored the old keys.