Windows 8 Start Screen and Apps Not Responding

I am in the same boat.  After an update in the last 2 or 3 days, My UI has stopped responding after a very short time.  The mouse moves, but the buttons do not highlight.  I can tap the Windows key and it will flip back and forth, and I can get the UI working again for only a very short time.. a matter of seconds.  Most of my apps are stuck with 'installing'.  It acts as if there's a mem leak or something stopped. I have many entries as well that svchost_TimeBroker has stopped.  I tried a refresh of my system, and Windows 8 unkindly moved all of C drive apps/progs to windows.old.  More time to fix things.  Meanwhile, if I get to my desktop, it will generally work as long as I am in a program, IE or explorer, or installed games that still exist after the refresh.  Please fix this asap, apparently there was a buggy update.  I have run the UI troubleshooter, relogged from local account to active and back to local, ensured the computer time is correct, and ran the update troubleshooter, all to no avail.

All right, I'm back working. The two updates I have are KB2769165 and KB2770917. 165 is a digital signature update... so maybe it's the digital signature for the MS server that my account authenticates to since that seems to be what the problem was. In any event, I rolled back to before those two updates hit and everything's working again.  I guess I'll wait to run updates for a few weeks to see what happens. I'll also check this thread to see if anyone else has more details. Hope this helps.

~ Ben

Ok, I restarted in safe mode at minimal settings and was able to operate. I think that with the network turned off, the system did not try to log into my WIndows LIve account. I have a restore point from the 15th that I'm going to try and revert to. From there, I plan on turning off WIndows Updates since I think the last two updates is what caused this. I'll keep you posted as to my results.

Matt et All,

I'm having the same problem and as of today. I had an update to restart for and this seems to be the result. It seems as if the svchost.exe is a parent for explorer.exe. I have the 32 bit and 64 bit versions running at home and only the 64 bit is affected, if that helps.

I really need to get this figured out, so I'll be watching this thread.

Thanks for your message.

I have not made any changes to my system.  The problem began however after the following Windows Updates were installed:  KB2761226, KB2737084, KB2729462, and KB2727528.  I have tried uninstalling those updates, but it didn't resolve the issue.

Regarding your steps for testing.  I have already tried that as it was suggested on several other posts.  It didn't work.  Even with all non-Microsoft services and startup items disabled, I still had the problem.

One other note.  I have two user accounts.  My main user account (which is an Admin account) is linked to a Microsoft account.  That account is the one with the problem.  If I login with my second account (which is a local account), it works fine. I would like to try reverting my main user account back to a local account, but I haven't been able to do that because I can't get to the Change PC Settings screen while logged in with that account.  Is there another (like from the command line) to revert to a local account?

Matt