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Cortana Freezing Bug: How To Fix

On one of my home PC’s running Windows 10 I’ve experienced a peculiar bug after a recent update. The Cortana search function would freeze and disappear after typing more than one character in it. I use the search box in the taskbar to navigate to most applications in Windows. When this fails it has a considerable negative impact on my experience.

After the normal Google searching for the problem, the solution wasn’t too obvious to find. the Microsoft support forums try to make it easy to find your solution by hiding all replies to a problem that aren’t considered the best. Nonetheless, I found a solution on the Microsoft forums from a user Sappy00. The original forum post will be linked at the end of this post. I have simplified the user’s suggestion here:

How To Fix Cortana Search Freezing After Typing One Character

Step One: Create a Secondary User Profile

If you only have one user profile on your Windows 10 machine, or all users on your PC are currently effected by this bug, you will need to create a new user profile. To do so, you must open a command prompt window. Since you probably can not do this via the search box, execute a “ctrl+shift+esc” to open a task manager.

Once you have task manager open, navigate to File / Run New Task. In the “Run” box type “cmd” and check “Create this task with administrative privileges”.

In the command prompt execute this command:

  net user /add tempuser 12345

“tempuser” is your new user’s username. “12345” is the password. This is completely up to you, but in my case I plan on deleting this profile as soon as I’m done with this process.

Now that you have a fresh user profile created, it’s time for step 2.

Step Two: Copy New Files To Your Original User Profile

Log out of your effected user profile. At the log in screen you should see the user profile we have just created. Log into it now. This should take a minute or so depending on the speed of your machine.

Once you are completely logged in, right click the start menu and select “File Explorer”. From here you will navigate to this folder:

  C:\Users\tempuser\AppData\Local\Packages

(If you do this manually by clicking through the folders, you will need to enable view of Hidden items. To do this, click on View and check the box marked “Hidden items”)

In this folder you will find a folder named “Microsoft.Windows.Cortana_{random_string_of_numbers}”

Copy this folder. Now navigate to this same “Packages” folder in your original user profile where you are experiencing the bug.

Delete the “Microsoft.Windows.Cortana” folder in your original user profile folder and paste the one we copied from the new user profile’s folder. You will be told a couple items can not be copied, but you can skip all of these. These files were not important when I did this.

Once all of these files are copied over, you may now log out of the temporary user profile and back into your original profile. The issue should now be resolved. Don’t forget to delete your temporary user profile.

I adapted this solution from an answer on the Microsoft forums by a user named Sappy00. You can find the original answer here.

Installing KeePass and KeeFox on Ubuntu 16.04

I’ve found numerous instructions with varying techniques on how to properly install KeePass2 and integrate it with KeeFox on Ubuntu Desktop 16.04. Unfortunately, following the wrong directions lead me to backtrack numerous times and the whole process seemed like it was more trouble then it was worth. Luckily for you, I’ve gone through the pain so you don’t have to. As of the day of this post’s publishing this is the technique that will yield the desired results.

Step 1: Install KeePass and Mono

KeePass2, of course, is your password database program. Mono is an open-source implementation of the Windows .NET Framework. It helps certain programs, like KeePass function properly in both Windows and Linux.

Installing KeePass on Ubuntu 16.04

Do not download KeePass2 via terminal. If you have done this, uninstall it using this command:

  sudo apt-get remove keepass2

Instead, visit the KeePass official download page. Download the latest portable version of KeePass in ZIP format.

Once downloaded, extract the contents of the ZIP into the directory of your choosing. I chose “home/{user}/keepass2”.

Installing Mono

In order to use KeePass, we need to install mono. To do this, we need to add the proper repositories and install mono. Open up terminal and execute these commands:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-official.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mono-complete

Step 2: Install KeeFox

Open up Firefox (which you are probably viewing this post with) and visit the KeeFox download page.

Install Keefox normally, restarting Firefox when installation is complete.

When Firefox starts up again, you should be greeted with an orange KeeFox page. If this is not the case, click on the new KeeFox icon in the top right of your tool bar and click “Launch KeePass”. Here there will be some instructions which may look familiar. Ignore these and let’s move on to step 3.

Step 3: Configure KeeFox

Next, we need to copy a plugin file from the KeeFox extension’s folder into our KeePass2 plugins directory. Use this command (replace {} fields to reflect yours) to copy it:

sudo cp /home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/{****}.default/extensions/keefox@chris.tomlinson/deps/KeePassRPC.plgx /home/{user}/keepass2/Plugins

Now that our plgx file is where it needs to be, let’s set up KeeFox’s default folders. Click the KeeFox icon and select “Options” and open the “KeePass” tab.

Enter the correct directories for KeePass and mono installations as shown in the image above (replace the bracketed text for your username) and click on the “Remember” checkbox.

Restart Firefox and you should be ready to go.