I have seen a lot of sites asking the same question over and over. “Why can I not type in Cortana? Why can I not write after pressing Start Button? Why can I not search?” Oh and most of these are also followed by “Why can I not start Edge?”

I know, because it happened to me, and I was looking for answers.

Most sites go about the same default route of “Please start command prompt (admin) and powershell and “blah blah blah.

I think it only worked once… all the others I’ve seen have not been answered and their questions are still not resolved.

Well… I figured it out.

Enable your Windows Firewall Service!

It is really that stupid! With the Windows Firewall Service stopped (or disabled obviously), you cannot type to search after pressing start. You can not work with Cortana. And Edge will not start. I do not know why.

I’m not especially smart, I just looked at the powershell output of that red text wall. People on the advice fora kept saying “ignore the red”, and they are half right: there are some modules that this command will try to install that are higher version already, and so the red text says that

Add-AppxPackage : Deployment failed with HRESULT: 0x80073D06, The package could not be installed because a higher version of this package is already installed.
Windows cannot install package Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.23816.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe because it has version 14.0.23816.0. A higher version 14.0.24123.0 of this package is
already installed.

However, if your have deactivated or stopped Firewall, it will also say for MOST of the modules that the deployment failed because the Firewall service is not running.

This got me thinking and I re-enabled the Firewall. Immediately, Cortana and search and Edge all started working again.

Curious as I am, I stopped Firewall service again. True enough, Search, Cortana and Edge stopped working.

Microsoft! Get your head out of your ass!!