This was a fun start to the morning. My laptop running Windows 11 22H2 finished doing its reboots after the November 2022 updates (two reboots required this month) and I signed in as normal only to be greeted with no Start Menu/button and no buttons on the taskbar for any of the running applications that had auto-started (e.g. Teams). What’s left of the old notification area (aka system tray for you oldskool people) was showing, but the time and date and the new flyout notification panel was missing too.
I’ll cut to the cause and solution for me: AppLocker was blocking a new modern app with a package name of MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core. Its application name is Windows Feature Experience Pack (which is the same as another app with a package name of MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS).
Looking in Event Viewer in the log Microsoft-Windows-AppLocker/Packaged app-Deployment sure enough there were quite a few errors (event ID 8025 in this log) saying that this app was prevented from running.
Solution
Adding a new AppLocker packaged app rule to allow this app to run and then doing a gpupdate /force fixed things.
Of course, this will only fix the problem for you if you are using AppLocker to restrict modern apps. Which at the moment is the only solution after some not-so-clever people at Microsoft decided to make Store apps unmanageable for business users in any other way. So now you’re left playing inverse whack-a-mole with AppLocker rules after they change something. This is why I release updates to myself and another colleague in IT before the rest of the organisation get them.
Tip
If you need to run gpmc.msc via UAC to fix this problem, hit Win-R and type gpmc.msc then press Ctrl-Shift-Enter and the UAC elevation process will be invoked.
