[New Feature]: Automatically repair Microsoft.Winget.Source component if it is broken on a user's PC

[aaron-stebner]

Description of the new feature/enhancement

My team has a tool that uses WinGet to install components. On a customer's PC, we observed this failure:

winget list --exact --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget --disable-interactivity --accept-source-agreements failed with return code 0x80073CFC System.Exception: winget list --exact --id Microsoft.PowerShell --source winget --disable-interactivity --accept-source-agreements failed with return code 0x80073CFC

The root cause of this issue was that Microsoft.Winget.Source was in a bad state, specifically we saw this:

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source

Name              : Microsoft.Winget.Source
Publisher         : CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US
Architecture      : Neutral
ResourceId        :
Version           : 2025.115.913.49
PackageFullName   : Microsoft.Winget.Source_2025.115.913.49_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe
InstallLocation   : C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.Winget.Source_2025.115.913.49_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsFramework       : False
PackageFamilyName : Microsoft.Winget.Source_8wekyb3d8bbwe
PublisherId       : 8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsResourcePackage : False
IsBundle          : False
IsDevelopmentMode : False
NonRemovable      : False
IsPartiallyStaged : False
SignatureKind     : Store
Status            : PackageOffline, DataOffline, NotAvailable

The customer was able to resolve this issue by manually removing and re-installing Microsoft.Winget.Source like this:

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source
Install-Module Microsoft.WinGet.Client -Force -Repository PSGallery
Repair-WinGetPackageManager -Force -Latest

It would be nice if WinGet could self-heal in this type of scenario. Otherwise each app that depends on WinGet would need to implement repair logic or the customer needs to discover how to do that themselves.

Proposed technical implementation details (optional)

No response

[mdanish-kh]

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source
Install-Module Microsoft.WinGet.Client -Force -Repository PSGallery
Repair-WinGetPackageManager -Force -Latest

Just an FYI: Instead of re-installing WinGet, I feel sudo winget source reset --force may have done the trick if it was only a source-specific issue

[denelon]

In this case there were other issues with the default drive used as a modification after WinGet had been initially installed.

[aaron-stebner]

Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source | Remove-AppxPackage -AllUsers
Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.Winget.Source
Install-Module Microsoft.WinGet.Client -Force -Repository PSGallery
Repair-WinGetPackageManager -Force -Latest

Just an FYI: Instead of re-installing WinGet, I feel sudo winget source reset --force may have done the trick if it was only a source-specific issue

We had our customer try this source reset command as a part of our troubleshooting process, but it didn't help.