TL ; DR: Run this.

 

There were some wicked vulnerabilities patched this year in the world of the Microsoft Store (aka UWP apps), and the high amount of scan detections revealed a critical mistake: Many organizations, in an effort to reduce distractions on corporate workstations, decided to fully uninstall the Microsoft Store during OS Deployment. Not only did this prevent users from installing the Weather App, but it also prevented the update of any modern applications. Poorly communicated when Windows 10 was being deployed, the Store is required for maintenance of modern apps.

You know what else was removed? The Windows 10 media apps, with all those regularly updated codecs. Then they had to install something like VLC Media Player for some static codecs. Why? Because the package file for the app is named Zune; admins saw Zune in the app list and axed it…because anyone who actually bought a Microsoft Zune (it was an MP3 player) surely doesn’t use it anymore.

Like the store, this is a common mistake that impacts adoption of the platform and creates unnecessary work for the admin that must package, test, and manage another media application and codec pack, but I digress…

Depending on the severity of the removal process of the Microsoft Store, remediation may be as simple as running an Install-AppXPackage cmdlet to reinstall it, but in my experience nobody that has went through the effort to remove the store has stopped there…they’ve completely stripped the binaries from the system so it cannot be mistakenly reinstalled again.

Spending a little time researching on the interwebs led me to several articles that directed me to a 3rd party site that could extract the files from Microsoft’s Content Delivery Network, but the URL was blocked on the firewall and we didn’t want to work around it or request an exclusion.

Windows 10 LTSC also doesn’t come with the Store, and due to the increasing prevalence of modern apps, there is a legitimate use case to have the Store on LTSC devices. I found kissshot’s GitHib repo, with all the required bundles and a readable .cmd wrapper to install it with. It worked great on the non-LTSC versions of 1909 and 21H2, and ended up being the choice to resolve the issue in production. The content can be downloaded here.

To deploy this, we added it as a Legacy Package in Configuration Manager, and called Add-Store.cmd in the Program.

 

Hope this helps!

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