App certification kit 2.2 hangs and brings metro interface down with it

Question

Hello,

I am experiencing a problem with the Windows App Certification Kit version 2.2... The problem appears at the second step in the process (verifying the application). My windows store application doesn't seem to be launched at all (not full screen anyway). And after a few minutes, the whole system goes crazy. Icons dissapear from the taskbar, the charms don't work any more, Alt+Tab doesn't work any more, in the metro interface, icons don't work any more. If I open the start menu, I can't go back to any application (including the desktop). The only way to get control back is to log out, or restart the computer (Ctrl+Alt+Delete and the power button still work). This looked to me at first as an out of memory problem, but the task manager reports a CPU usage of 5-15%, and memory is steady at about 50% during the whole process.

Time didn't solve this problem either, I left it for about half an hour last night, and still the same problem.

A plausible cause to this problem could be another problem I experienced a while earlier, and I haven't used the certification kit since then. For some reason, my user profile was corrupted, and the only way to recover it was to create another profile, and copy the old files on top of the new ones. This seemed to be the only way to recover my user files with minimal loss.

So what could cause this problem, and how can I get it fixed?

Answer 1

Update: I tried certifying another application, and it worked without any problem. So this problem seems to happen only for a specific application.

Looking in the system logs, this is what I found around the time this problem occured:

"Activation of the app microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe!Microsoft.WindowsLive.Mail for the Windows.Launch contract failed with error: The application didn't start."

- <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
+ <System>
  <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Immersive-Shell" Guid="{315A8872-923E-4EA2-9889-33CD4754BF64}" />
  <EventID>5961</EventID>
  <Version>0</Version>
  <Level>2</Level>
  <Task>5961</Task>
  <Opcode>0</Opcode>
  <Keywords>0x4000000000000000</Keywords>
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2013-04-14T00:18:19.647940100Z" />
  <EventRecordID>101662</EventRecordID>
  <Correlation />
  <Execution ProcessID="1992" ThreadID="3264" />
  <Channel>Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational</Channel>
  <Computer>Tibi-PC</Computer>
  <Security UserID="S-1-5-21-3987286551-2107418531-56338953-1009" />
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data Name="AppId">microsoft.windowscommunicationsapps_8wekyb3d8bbwe!Microsoft.WindowsLive.Mail</Data>
  <Data Name="ContractId">Windows.Launch</Data>
  <Data Name="ErrorCode">-2144927141</Data>
  </EventData>
  </Event>

This is just one of the errors, there are around 15 of these at very close time intervals.

I submitted the application with the problem to the windows store, and it is already at the "Content compliance" step, it passed the "Technical compliance" step without any problems.