Windows 10: Windows Spotlight Broken by Jan2020 update. Broken yet again by MS.

Cumulative update Jan2020 for 1909 installed and now Windows Spotlight does not download pictures for lock screen. It just shows first picture from my pictures one with lake in mountains on all 5 of my PCs. Even if I do this:Go into the Settings App - Personalisation - LockScreen

Set Background to picture and choose one
Then open Windows File Explorer and paste each of these into the Address Bar
Delete everything in each folder
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\Settings
Then right click your Start Button, choose Powershell admin
Run copy and Paste this command and hit Enter
Get-AppxPackage -allusers *ContentDeliveryManager* foreach {Add-AppxPackage "$$_.InstallLocation\appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode -register }

which is just cleaning Content Delivery Manager cache and reregistering it.

It does nothing. I see some file downloading to:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\LocalState\Assets
biggest of them 134kb size, jpg file showing hand drawn bald guy with mustage holding hedge trimmers.
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages\Microsoft.Windows.ContentDeliveryManager_cw5n1h2txyewy\Settings

I see settings.dat grow in size to 256kb.

A thats it! No bigger files are downloading and spotlight just shows mountain lake picture all the time.

IMHO it is some bigger issue. Maybe url mismatch in the Content Delivery code or server problem and CD can't download spotlight images. it can't repaired by above procedure. Fix it MS, you broke the spotlight yet again.

:)

 

Windows Spotlight broken, not downloading images

Yes, that was part of the 'fix' and Brink's tutorial does that (and more).

On it's own, I've never found it to be sufficient to fix a badly broken Spotlight. Back in 1607 I seriously broke Spotlight by some injudicious manual changes (I was trying to 'un-like' an image that had got stuck there until I got sick of seeing it). An in-place repair install was the only fix for that *Sad

 

Spotlight is broken


Hi, I found it's relatively easy to break this if you fiddle with its basic operation, hard or not possible to fix. The final thing I was missing - the preview screen- didn't return until I upgraded to the CU.

It can take some unobvious actions to try to repair it. (I make no recommendation).
E.g.
Broken Lock Screen prefs: Windows Spotlight not working Solved - Windows 10 Forums

Windows spotlight NOT WORKING! - Windows 10 Forums
post #6

 

Spotlight is broken


Like @dalchina, I've found it (all too) easy to break.

It may not be Spotlight in this case, it may be something in your user profile. I've found when it's broken it can still be working for other user accounts.

Spotlight seems to work better in the Fall Creators Update (1709). For the first time ever it's now setting the sign in screen to the Spotlight image on a cold start or a restart (1703 and before showed 'the cave').

It's still fragile though. I've already had to Reset and Re-register Windows Spotlight in Windows 10 once or twice.