Windows 10 search: can’t open Control Panel items

control-panelwindows 10windows-search

Update

I've mentioned this in the comment already, but it's worth repeating here to avoid any misunderstanding: this issue is gone after numerous Windows updates. This means that unfortunately I won't be able to test/accept proposed solutions. Hopefully your comments will help someone else, though, so thank you for writing them!

Original issue

I've upgraded to Windows 10 Pro and have a strange issue with Windows Search: whenever a search result is a Control Panel item (e.g. "Administrative Tools", "Mouse", "Sound" etc.; and I'm talking about the old style Control Panel, not the new better looking Settings window) I can't open them with a click/enter!
This issue also applies to a few other setting items not directly visible in the Control Panel (e.g. Disk Management settings such as "Create and format hard disk partitions").

Other search results are functioning just fine: I can open apps, files, Control Panel itself, settings exclusive to the new Settings window, e.g. "Pen and Touch" (it's a guess re exclusive, since when a setting item is available in both old Control Panel and new Settings, I can't open it), etc.

I can use the settings themselves just fine, but I have to first open the Control Panel itself, which is rather annoying.

Best Answer

There is a fair amount of evidence that adding or removing additional languages in windows 10 can break search capabilities, specifically including control panel items not showing up in searches.

Since you are using multiple languages, this seems to line up well with your issues. The theory is that different components of Windows search end up with different language settings which (it gets less clear here) breaks things.

The fixes offered up are fairly consistent:

  1. Remove all languages besides English.
  2. Rebuild the search indexes.

To remove installed languages run the following command in an elevated command prompt and follow the prompts:

 Lpksetup /u

Then rebuild the indexes:

From Indexing Options, Advanced Options, click Rebuild to begin reindexing. Then restart Windows.

Sources:

superuser
superuser
tenforums

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