I’m writing this having just spent some unwanted effort resolving issues with the Xbox App, Microsoft Store and Windows Update on my Windows 11 PC. Like many people when I encountered an error using the Xbox App I turned to Google to see how to solve it. I was even given an error by the Xbox App telling me that I didn’t have Gaming Services installed along with the specific error code 0x80070422. Should be easy to solve with that info, right?

Symptoms

The issues I have witnessed being caused by this include:

• The error code 0x80070422 is displayed or logged
• Error when downloading from the Microsoft Store: “Something happened on our end.  Try again later.”
• Error/warning message in the Windows Xbox App: “Gaming Services Required”
• An error message when attempting to sign-in to either the Microsoft Store, Xbox Live or any other Microsoft Service from Windows 10/11
• An error message when attempting to use the Microsoft Store that Windows Update is not enabled: “Turn on Windows Update” “Windows Update is disabled. You can repair Windows Update by running the Windows Update troubleshooter in Settings”

Analysis

The reason I even feel that this needs sharing is due to the misleading info I found based on the typical searches most would perform when encountering this problem. The help available even from Microsoft just seems woefully misinformed. I hope that by describing the various errors and other things I have experienced that I will make this article easier to find for anyone who encounters this in the future.

Almost all advice seems to focus on enabling and running the Windows Update Service and if that does not work then the focus seems to be on repairing the Store App or the Xbox Appx Apps. Like many who seem to have encountered this I did not find any advice helpful and ended up at the point of facing a complete re-install of Windows (a flippant suggestion again from Microsoft Support). From what I can see the confusion here seems to boil down to an ambiguous error message:

“The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.”

This is further compounded by the error code in the title of this post: 0x80070422. The only Microsoft KB article I could find on the subject suggests this is due to the Windows Update Service being disabled or unable to start.

Like many people I was actually very quickly able to get the Windows Update Service up and running again and yet the symptoms persisted. I was not prepared to reinstall Windows so I fired up some process tracing and dug into the Event Logs. It didn’t take long to see that Windows Update is actually working just fine but we still see the symptoms. Further tracing and digging revealed that there is a chain of components that Windows Update as well as Microsoft Store and Account Sign-in features require to work properly. This isn’t actually at all surprising and so it is even more reason to be terribly disappointed in the Microsoft Support responses to the issues here. In almost every case of a missing dependency the Event Log simply outputs the “The service cannot be started” error. However, by following the Event Log source info i.e. “.\src\Shell\WinStore.App\Acquisition\WindowsUpdateInstaller.cs (1054)” I was able to navigate my way through to identify the following list of Windows Services that are needed to get back up and running.

If I had this information to begin with I would have saved myself hours and now I hope I can save many others from the same time and the pain of having to reinstall Windows!

TL;DR

I needed to ensure a whole bunch of Windows Services were running. The Xbox App was working before Christmas and my machine is not enrolled in MDM so I have no idea why or when these critical services became disabled, but by trial and error I found that the following Windows Services must be enabled (ideally Automatic Start) and running. Please let me know if you find any further Services that should be added here. I suspect others could encounter this issue due to other dependencies having become disabled.

• Microsoft Account Sign-in Assistant
• Secondary Log-on
• Windows Installer
• Microsoft Store Install Service
• Windows Management Instrumentation
• Windows Management Service
• Windows Time
• Windows Update
• 4 x Xbox Services

Some notes on the above: The Secondary Log-on Service may only be needed in certain cases. If you do not need to use multiple Microsoft Accounts and you have a reason to disable this service then please give that a try. Also the 4 x Xbox Services are of course only needed if you are trying to get the Xbox App working. These include three different Xbox Live Services and an Xbox Accessory Service. You should only have one of each. I have seen issues reported where there are duplicated services here.