Problem with Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00 on Windows 11 workstations

Question

Hello,

Suddenly one after the other our Windows 11 workstations, members of corporate domain, that have been in normal use for a couple of years, started failing with the symptom of the taskbar turning gray, losing all its icons and popping up a message complaining about various dll files part of the Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.33519.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe package. At a closer look inside the folder "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.33519.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe" all the dll files have 0 length !... Like being corrupted ?!...

Although the image i get listing the installed VCLibs as shown in the uploaded image there are various versions of VCLibs and UWP related installed but they don't work properly. Strangely the package Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00.UWPDesktop_14.0.33519.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe is listed as "paused". In some cases the dll files inside the UWPDesktop are also corrupted (0 length files) !...

Deinstalling and reinstalling the latest Visual C Redistributables (VC_redist.x86.exe, VC_redist.x64.exe) didn't solve the problem.

The only solution to workaround the problem is to copy the dlls of the exact version from a valid Windows installation, which requires changing the permissions of the specified folder(s).

Also important to mention that the workstations are behind Web proxy for security reasons and they do not have free internet access and the last windows update they received is very old (June of 2022) (os build 10.22000.778 if my memory serves me well).

Does anyone encounter this kind of error ?

Could it be that the MS Store updates that are running independently of Windows updates in the background provoked the problem (corruption of VCLibs dlls inside WindowsApps folder) ? At the best of my understanding the MS store update repository is different of the rest of the Windows update repository.

Did something changed lately with these repositories ?

What should we do next ???

Thx in advance,

Nikos

Answer 1

Is there any way to check the access to the MS Store repository, network wise? To see if the MS store updates are functioning properly, are there any logs on the workstation side to check upon, may be DISM logs ?