Turn On or Off Background Apps in Windows 10  

Further update.

New day, booted PC, Edge not used (been almost 3 hours), yet there it is running in task manager!!!!

It is still disabled as suggested by TairikuOkami in post #26.

Still broken in 17134.48. Background apps still resets to "on" upon reboot and the background apps list is still empty.

Hi, my name is Tasos and i'm from Greece, just registered because i have encountered the same problem with background apps keep turning on after every reboot on a fresh installed 1803 system. I did some comparison between a system that was upgraded from 1709 to 1803 (which worked fine) and a freshly installed 1803 and found some differences in the registry.

First difference the upgraded system does not have the BackgroundAppGlobalToggle DWORD under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search, but i did not make any difference when i deleted it from the other system.

Second, under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\BackgroundAccessApplications the upgraded system has an extra registry key called Migrated DWORD with value 4.


I gave it a go and created the Migrated key on the 1803 fresh installed system. So far and after many reboots, Let apps run in the background in privacy settings has stopped resetting itself to on and no apps are running in the background.

I can not guarantee it will work, but at least it did on my system.

trashbag said:

Thanks for finding this out, creating the Migrated key on a fresh 1803 installation does seem to prevent "Let apps run in the background" from resetting itself upon restart.

EDIT: This appears to only be cosmetic as Edge still shows up as a background process in Task Manager.

The "Choose which apps can run in the background" list is still empty and I suspect, broken. Other App Permission settings such as App Diagnostics don't have any specific apps listed however they at least display a loading wheel when I click on the App Diagnostics setting and display an "Apps that need your permission blah blah are listed here" while the Background Apps setting doesn't even display a loading wheel or a message. Before 1803 stuff like Cortana, Settings and Edge were display here so I'm supposing it's still broken in some way in 1803.

Go ahead and turn Let apps run in the background to ON. Then go to Apps & Features, select Edge from the list and go to Advanced settings and hit Reset. Once done, open Edge, now it should appear on the Let apps run in the background list. Now you can turn Let apps run in the background to OFF again. This worked for me for any app that wasn't listed.

TechHool said:

Go ahead and turn Let apps run in the background to ON. Then go to Apps & Features, select Edge from the list and go to Advanced settings and hit Reset. Once done, open Edge, now it should appear on the Let apps run in the background list. Now you can turn Let apps run in the background to OFF again. This worked for me for any app that wasn't listed.

Works for me, thanks.

TechHool said:

Second, under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\BackgroundAccessApplications the upgraded system has an extra registry key called Migrated DWORD with value 4.


I gave it a go and created the Migrated key on the 1803 fresh installed system. So far and after many reboots, Let apps run in the background in privacy settings has stopped resetting itself to on and no apps are running in the background.

I can not guarantee it will work, but at least it did on my system.

Thanks for this, it works on my system too.

Another thing here is that the sub keys only list a few apps, i.e. the ones that now appear in the background apps list in privacy settings, whereas all installed apps were listed in 1709.

Could this mean that all the apps not listed are running in the background at boot with no option to turn them off?

TechHool said:

Go ahead and turn Let apps run in the background to ON. Then go to Apps & Features, select Edge from the list and go to Advanced settings and hit Reset. Once done, open Edge, now it should appear on the Let apps run in the background list. Now you can turn Let apps run in the background to OFF again. This worked for me for any app that wasn't listed.

It works here too! I also noticed, turning on/off and opening Background Apps is not necessary.
Just "Reset" any or all WinApps (one by one) and then you can find them under "Background Apps" list.

Thanks again TechHool :)

PS: Turning Off "Background Apps", cannot affect Edge.