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Using a Windows Shell replacement to Explorer in Windows 7 has worked well. Moving our Shell to Windows 10 is also working, but with a few unwanted side effects, including the fact that I cannot launch Settings from the command prompt or Windows Explorer. I get a time-out error. When I set the Shell back to Explorer the Settings page works as expected. My initial thought was that the Settings page/app requires access to the notification area of the task bar--which would not be there for our Shell. Similarly I found in Windows 7 that Windows Updates would not work properly without access to the notification area. I have not proven or confirmed this is the issue in Windows 10. How do you display the Settings window in Windows 10 when Explorer is not the Shell?

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You have not specified how you configured your app to run as shell, but unless you are using Shell Launcher V2, you can't run UWP apps when running a custom shell as UWP apps are somehow linked with or depend on explorer.exe or parts of it.

Since you are asking, I am assuming you aren't using V2. Since the settings app is a UWP app, you can't run it, but I can't find a Microsoft website to provide a quote for this claim.

You can run any app you want with V2, UWP or otherwise, but you do need an enterprise version of Windows 10 or Windows 11, as stated on their website. You can use their sample script from GitHub to set it up.

The Microsoft website mentioned above explains in the "Differences between Shell Launcher v1 and Shell Launcher v2" section that:

You can use a custom Windows desktop application that can then launch UWP apps, such as Settings and Touch Keyboard.

This does seem to imply that other ways to launch a custom shell do not allow launching UWP apps and seems to be the only official admission of this behavior from Microsoft that I can find.

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if you have access to Command prompt (cmd.exe) you can display Windows setting as follows:

start ms-settings:
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  • I can launch the command prompt, as you have listed, as long as Explorer is the Shell--it does not work when Explorer is not the Shell.
    – clsturgeon
    Jan 29, 2016 at 18:22

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