MSIX Packaging Tool Crash: Error code: 0x80131500

FYI

I recall seeing similar behavior in the following scenario.  On a system where the packaging tool was configured with a code signing certificate, as well as other important settings like a modified exclusion list, the configuration file was copied to a different VM. Upon copying the file (overwriting the %LocalAppData\Packages copy) and starting the packaging tool it would crash.  When this was done without code signing configured this scenario works.  It appeared likely that when the packaging tool tries to decrypt the code signing information on the other machine it did not handle the exception.

So I would guess that your configuration file was somehow broken, and your solution to repair would have cleaned out the file.