AppReadiness Service and Black Screen

OffColour1972 

Thanks so much for this helpful post.  It's September of 2021 now, but this issue must be a persistent one.  A couple of weeks ago, our family computer began to exhibit this same issue as described here and confirmed by many others.  We have six user accounts on our family computer.  Upon login of any user account (except my youngest daughter interestingly enough), it would go to a black screen for five to eight minutes and just sit there.  I could launch Task Manager and manually run Windows explorer, although it did nothing.  I thought perhaps explorer was crashing upon logon. The only remedy was to wait until whatever background process completed.  At which point the desktop would pop up as though nothing was wrong at all!

I originally suspected my expired Anti-Virus, and removed it completely, but that didn't resolve it.  Installation of a new AntiVirus application (ESET) and a full system scan revealed nothing, nor changed anything.  Removal of several other applications on the suspect list likewise did nothing. 

I was definitely at a loss.  So thank you for posting this!  I also saw similar posts on other forums scattered across the Internet as far back as 2018.  (it's all about figuring out the right search terms to use when searching)

FYI: the moment I disabled the AppReadiness Service, logon was instantaneous.  No more black screen on any account.  I was concerned that this disabled important Windows functionality, but so far nothing appears to be failing to work.  And performance appears to be unaffected... in fact, things run faster.

According to Microsoft support, "App Readiness gets apps ready for use the first time a user signs in to this PC and when adding new apps."

So perhaps I will need to re-enable it for running updates or installing other applications... I'll see what the impact is with it disabled for a while.