Recently I was setting up a new Microsoft Windows 2019 Server image and as part of our onboarding process, we are required to patch and secure any new system. Seeing how Server 2019 is a new O/S in our environment, we didn't have any automation script to take care of all this. Part of the onboarding consists in either disabling services that are not needed or providing a justification for our baselines. As we were tackling this step, a user reported that the Start Menu wasn't working. I checked, under my profile I did not experience this issue. Another user who had logged in also did not have the same problem.
I went ahead and started looking up and remembered that we had a similar issue with Windows 10, the fix was making sure a couple of services were running and then running the following command in Power Shell:
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}
Unfortunately that did not resolve the issue for the user. It wasn't until I tested another server that I started experiencing the issue. The above fix did not work for our Server 2019 image. At this point I decided to get Microsoft involved. We tried different variations of the above fix, a lot of permissions and other things but one thing we noticed that was that the ShellExperienceHost service was not running under affected accounts. No rhyme or reason. We tried local users, other domain users and the issue was there with any new user. Some of the errors that were being logged were ID 69 with source AppModel-Runtime.
The errors would generate any time you left clicked the Start Menu or you attempted to launch Display Settings and they would mention ShellExperienceHost, Cortana or another app.
Below is an example of the error you would receive whenever you would try to launch the Display Settings.
After a lot of back and forth with Microsoft and doing my own testing, it turns out that I disabled a critical service that was the culprit for all these issues. Microsoft tech support did not have this documented anywhere according to the tech whom I worked with, thus me posting this in case someone else runs into a similar issue. The service in question is the Capability Access Manager Service (camsvc). The description for the service states that it handles Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application access and capability. Whatever the case, I'm glad this was resolved after all the troubleshooting we ended up doing.
tl;dr - do not disable the camsvc (Capability Access Manager) service as it will break your start menu and other Windows 10/Server 2019 features.
