In my day job as an IT Engineer, I have to work with Windows 10 because there’s no escaping that monolithic juggernaut.

While I do like how Microsoft has approached making Windows 10 a platform that it keeps iterating upon, the number of strange and annoying bugs that remain build after build reminds me why I don’t use it on my personal machine.

Recently, working at a client where we were implementing a Windows 10 pilot (Build 1909) and updated Group Policies, we found the latter were not applying. In particular, we use a Group Policy to customize the Start Menu layout for Windows 10 so that all the user PCs look the same.

When investigating the event logs, we found Event ID 455 with the following description:

“TILEREPOSITORYS-1-5-18: Error -1023 (0xfffffc01) occurred while opening logfile
C:WINDOWSsystem32configsystemprofileAppDataLocalTileDataLayerDatabaseEDB.log. Access Denied.”

(The error code in parenthesis might be different).

The first thing we found was that the path “C:WINDOWSsystem32configsystemprofileAppDataLocalTileDataLayerDatabase” was missing (there was no TileDataLayer folder). Easy enough, we created the missing folders. However, we found the error persisted and the Start Menu GPO was still not applying. The account we were logging in with had local administrator access, so it didn’t make a lot of sense.

OR DID IT?

The fix?

Right-click on the TileDataLayer folder, and assign EVERYONE rights to the folder and sub-folder.

Even though the local Administrators group already had access to the folder and sub-folder, the Start Menu layout wouldn’t apply and the errors persisted until we did this.

Oh, Microsoft.

Please note: this content is provided without any warranty or guarantee of suitability and is for educational purposes only.