Windows 10 Taskbar and other components not working correctly

Question

After a recent Windows10 update I noticed various functions of the Taskbar not working properly anymore. Upon some investigation I noticed even more Problems.

• The Windows button in the Taskbar is not working (left & right click)
• The Windows key on the keyboard does not open the startmenu either (other functions like win+e work properly)
• I can only left click application symbols (to start them), right clicking does nothing
• Shift-click (left & right) on the application symbols works
• Right clicking on the Taskbar opens the context menu but I can not open the "settings" menu (after clicking on the entry the menu closes and nothing happens)
• Left clicking on the Battery, Wifi, Volume, Date or Info-center icon does nothing
• Right clicking on these icons however does work
• For any other (running) application icons (e.g. hidden icons) left and right click is working

When further looking into it I noticed that some settings like the folder display options had changed and opening .bmp files with the regular windows-photo viewer now yields an error. Interface not supported

As I wanted to create a new user to see whether the problem persisted through different users I received another error message. Class not registered I receive the same error when trying to access "ms-settings:".

Unfortunately my only restorepoint is after the update.

When starting in safe mode I get the error message "sihost.exe - system warning - Unknown Hard Error" and all of the above also applies.

So I tried various "solutions":

• Restart Explorer through the Taskmanager
• Stopping the "Tile Data model server" process
• List item

• Deleting all files from

  %localappdata%\TileDataLayer\Database\

  vedatamodel.edb, vedatamodel.jfm, EDB.log could not be removed

• Using startmenu.diagcab it found that

  "Microsoft.Windows.ShellExperienceHost"

  and

  "Microsoft.Windows.Cortana"

  were not correctly installed but failed to install them.

• Using the following PowerShell script (from a cmd with admin rights)

  Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml"}

• Running "sfc /scannow" - but not finding anything

• Countless restarts ;)

Neither of which seemed to have any effect.

I'm using Version 1607 (Build 14393.187)

All the of those problems appear for every user.