Windows app is blank, how to troubleshoot ? part 1

[anyweb]

Introduction

I use my Windows app daily from a variety of devices to access my Cloud PC’s. Today like any day I clicked the Windows app icon but this time, nothing happened, the familiar Windows app did not appear.

So I clicked it again and this time it did appear but was blank.

Note: This problem occurred only on my ARM64 device, the Windows app worked just fine on other X64 devices.

As you can see in the screenshot above, it’s completely blank, empty of any content, so it’s impossible to use.

 

Trying to fix it

I thought the app somehow became corrupt, so I tried to reset & repair the app.

Neither of these options helped.

Next, I tried to end the processes for the Windows in task manager.

And killed the Windows365.exe process tree…

but these didn’t help either. The app simply refused to display it’s content.

While troubleshooting I noticed a Windows cumulative update was ready to install, you can see it below with the blank Windows app in-front.

so I let Windows update do it’s thing and manually restarted the computer.

It didn’t help.

What about the logs ?

Next I looked at the logs connected to the Windows app in %temp%\DiagOutputDir\Windows365\Logs as documented here.

The logs (4 in total) did not give me anything to go on other than to highlight that I did have a problem. The most interesting log snippet was this”

[2025-03-21 12:53:49.547] [async_logger] [error] [MSAL:0003] ERROR ErrorInternalImpl:134 Created an error: 8xg43, StatusInternal::InteractionRequired, InternalEvent::None, Error Code 0, Context ‘Could not find an account. Both local account ID and legacy MacOS user ID are not present’

but I saw that was repeated even when my Windows app was working, so I chose to ignore it.

So what else could I do at this point ? uninstall the app.

I then reinstalled the app from the store.

end result, same problem!

At this point I reverted back to the logs, and found this section, it reminded me of an error I saw this week when launching Outlook (New).

The Outlook (New) webview2 error is also shown on top of the log file below:

I never bothered to install that Webview2 component as it requires local administrative permissions to do so and I’m a standard user (as I should be).  So I elevated my session and tried clicking ok to the Outlook (New) message. That didn’t help, it just kept looping through a prompt asking me to install the new Webview2.

A google search led me to this post, and I downloaded the Webview2 client (for ARM64) from here. After deleting the reg key and installing the Webview2 update & restarting the computer I still had the issue with Outlook New prompting to install Webview2 and my Windows app not working.

Next up I checked the version of Windows app I was running and it was the latest, 2.0.365.0(ok there’s a insider preview version that’s newer but… I don’t think that’ll help).

 

At this point I’m out of ideas and will inform the Microsoft Group in charge of Windows 365 to see what they have to say about it, I’ll revert in part 2 once this is hopefully solved

cheers

niall