Solved Metro problems and Refresh fails

Daniol71

New Member
Messages
23
Hi all,

I have Windosws 8 Pro on my ASUS K70IJ. The pc was originally shipped with Windows 7 and I upgraded to Windows 8 about half a year ago and haven't had any major problems since. That was until yesterday. It seemed like a simple problem, the Metro apps won't open and some tiles won't even load (see screenshot). Anything downloaded from the store will not open and the store won't even launch. However, desktop apps will open just fine from the Metro Screen.


So far I've restarted the computer several times but it never fixes the issue. I've downloaded the Modern Apps troubleshooter from Microsoft but it didn't solve my problem either. I've tried all the fixes I could find on Google but none worked except one. The fix was to create a new user with a local account. On the new account the Metro Apps would all show up, launch perfectly, and the Store even worked. However I didn't like the idea of having to switch between accounts just to use different apps so I decided to try a Refresh.

I didn't want to do one first because I would lose desktop apps and it's a pain to download again and reinstall and find all the serial numbers. But I tried it using my install drive which is a USB. I have done Refreshs before with this same pc and the same USB and it's always worked fine, however now it always fails. Even automatic repair and system restore both fail. My backup drive is in England and I won't be there for another two months and needless to say, I haven't backed up in a while.

If anyone has an idea please help me, if it's just a fix for the Metro problem I'll be very thankful. However the failed Refresh worries me.

Also, the Metro screen has the same problems in Safe Mode and when I click an icon in Safe Mode (the Store for example) I get a message saying that the Built-In administrator can't open the app, "try with a different account" I don't know if this is normal.

I have two USB drives, one that I created when I first went from Win7 to Win8 and one that I created later called RECOVERY which is a boot image or something like that I guess.

Any help is much appreciated,

Daniel

Originally I tried to post this on Microsofts Support Community website but for some reason "The request failed" so I'm desperately looking around for help on other forums.
 

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My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Acer Aspire V3-772g
Hi Daniel,

Apologies that this won't help you now, but I also had problems with Metro Apps, and also managed to get blank tiles as in your picture. Like you, I found that if I used another account, there was no problem.

The trigger for me seemed to be that some Store updates failed (perhaps because I used Alt-Tab to switch away while it was updating; it didn't seem to like that). In my case the cure was to do a System Restore - however I see you've already tried that and not succeeded

If it was me, I'd probably try to take a complete disk image backup somehow (so you can at least get back to where you are now).

For future reference, once you get it working again, you can create a Custom Refresh image so you don't have to install your software again, although it will still lose some settings.

Hopefully someone else will come along with ideas on how to fix the Metro apps and Refresh problems.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1, 10
It's been a while since I posted sorry. I did a refresh and that solved the problem. Since then I have an automatic backup with a third party software doing all sorts of backup. The problem has only occurred once again and was easily fixed with a restore from those backups.
 

My Computer

System One

  • OS
    Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
    Computer type
    Laptop
    System Manufacturer/Model
    Acer Aspire V3-772g
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