Windows 10: Active apps fail to maximize or open up

Generally, I've gotten into the habit of rebooting Win10 every few days to clean it up. If Win10 were a person, it would be that roommate that never washes the dishes or does laundry. So no software on my system is ever running continuously for very long. I only mention this so that readers understand this problem I'm describing is not a by-product of some extensive run-time.


One reason I reboot frequently is because I've noticed that many of my programs active on my taskbar will begin to misbehave after a few days.


One of the MOST annoying behaviors looks like this:

• I click to expand/maximize an item on the task bar, something that has been working just fine for days. Maybe it's a browser, or the Task Manager, or my word processor, or file manager ... everything does this sooner or later.
• The window attempts to open, but jumps to the upper left corner of my screen. The window itself is usually extremely reduced. For example, I might open Chrome and it only shows the tabs and the address bar, and all of that is squeezed horizontally into a 1"x4" rectangle on a 27" diag screen.
• Then, almost immediately, it shrinks back down to the taskbar.
• No matter how many times I try to open the window, it does this, giving me no time to try to click on any button or adjustment or anything.
• When I hover my mouse over the taskbar item so see a preview of the window, the preview of items that do this weird behavior show blank pages, as if the display window for that item has been corrupted or something.
• I can't tell if the process behind the app is still working or not. For example, if I have a program that's downloading or uploading something, and I try to open the window to check progress and I can't see anything, has the transfer stopped or is it just the display?
• This problem is not re-producible beyond the immediate incident. It happens without warning, but once it begins, the program has to be restarted to fix it. No diagnostics that I've run when it happens show anything. No CPU spikes, no logged events.

The only solution I've been able to find is to kill the process in the task manager and re-start the program ... which, if I was in the middle of something not saved, can be very hazardous. I just have to hope whatever software I'm using is smart enough to recover itself.

AND ... if the task manager is the program behaving this way, I'd have to log-off and on again, or reboot the system to kick it back into visibility.


Coming from a Unix background, when I listen to my colleagues who work in Windows-based data centers, I just can't imagine how Windows could ever be used as a reliable server OS in any kind of serious production environment. So, I suspect there must be some kind of bare-bones, "reliable-ish" version of Windows available for commercial environments that isn't part of the product line available to the proletariat. If that's true, it's a shame Microsoft can't leverage some of that reliability into it's "ordinary user" version.

:)

 

Mail app will not open on 10041.

Hello Adam,

This is the suggested solution below if you haven't already tried it.

In this Windows 10 build 10041, the Mail, Calendar, and People apps may be broken due to a licensing issue with the Store Beta. To get these apps working again, you need to follow these steps:

• Open powershell as administrator
• Run the command Get-appxprovisionedpackage –online | where-object {$_.packagename –like “*windowscommunicationsapps*”} | remove-appxprovisionedpackage –online
• Re-install Mail, People and Calendar from the Store (green tile)

 

opening apps in task bar maximized

Like most people I expect, I've organized my shortcuts on the desktop so that some apps open minimized, some normal, and some maximized. This is done right-clicking on the shortcut, opening the properties window and choosing in the 'run' window whichever
size you prefer for that particular app/program. For example, I like to open file explorer as large as possible, i.e. maximized.

When it comes to shortcuts on the taskbar, however, I've never found a method which works. Take the file explorer shortcut. I can do this:

right-click folder which brings up the following list of options: desktop, downloads, documents, pictures, file explorer, unpin from taskbar

I right-click file explorer, then on 'properties' then choose run 'maximized', and click OK

Next time I click on the file explorer shortcut on the taskbar, instead of opening maximized, it opens in normal size.

I can maximize it manually of course, but it doesn't remember this, and the next time I open it from the taskbar, it's back to normal again.

This has been going on in multiple versions of Windows, at least back to Windows 7 and 8.

Does anybody have a solution to this?

Moved From: Windows / Windows 10 / Files, folders, & storage

 

Can I customize the list of suggest apps in the "Open with" menu?

You can't use it to add additional programs, only to set default programs.

Interestingly for me it shows nothing for text files:








Then if I want to add a portable app like Jarte Plus to open with context menu windows doesn't like it.





It's not present and is near impossible to add even via "look for an app on this PC"

OpenWithAdd to the rescue:




Result: