About a month ago, I noticed that several Windows apps had stopped working. Among these apps was the Microsoft Store, as well as the Weather app and “Solitaire & Casual Games.” About a week later, the “Media Player” and “Game Bar” suddenly stopped working as well — even though these apps had been functioning just fine beforehand.
All my research into the problem has yielded no results. I wanted to try repairing the apps, but that option isn’t available to me. I only have the “Reset” option. I attempted to reset them, but I simply received an error message stating that the app could not be reset. Initially, the whole situation looked like a virus to me.
However, virus scans—conducted using both Windows Defender and a separate antivirus program (which I installed specifically for this scan, and which had helped me resolve a virus issue years ago)—came up completely clean. Today, the “Movies & TV” app has also stopped working.
For all the apps that aren’t working, you see this weird black bar:
The date visible in the image corresponds to the date from which the program stopped working:
I tried manually reinstalling Media Player by downloading it from the Microsoft Store website, but the installation failed.
I don’t know if this has anything to do with my problem, but whenever I try to open an audio or video file now, I see this strange “Microsoft WinRT Storage API” appearing in place of both Media Player and “Movies & TV.” Until the day before yesterday, it only appeared in place of Media Player. This is what it looks like:
I tried running DISM and SFC many times, but it wasn’t helpful. I have used wsreset.exe to fix Microsoft Store but got the error mesage:
I installed Windows Repair from Tweaking.com and tried to repair the Windows apps with it, but the result was the exact opposite, even more Windows apps were damaged as a result.
It now appears to affect several codecs as well. For instance, the webp codec suddenly stopped working, too.
