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Windows 10 Troubleshooting: Power Plans disappear, Windows Services show error 2 in description

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Symptom:

All power plans in

Control Panel/Power Options

disappeared and you cannot create a new power plan. If you open an administrative command prompt and enter the command

powercfg /l

you get a list of power plans, which contains only the GUIDs, but no name. Adding a name to each of the listed GUIDs with a command like

powercfg /changename 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e Balanced

will give you the name and the appearance in Power Options back, but you are still unable to configure

 Change plan settings/Advanced Settings

Other symptoms

If you open the services console, the most services show up with an error 2 in the description column telling, that the description could not be retrieved.

Also some other Windows tools may fail.

 

Solution

The reason for the issue may be a missing registry value, which could have been removed by a 3rd party uninstaller. To reestablish the key perform following steps:

  • launch regedit as Administrator.
  • navigate to key
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MUI
  • if it does not already exist, create a new key with the name 
    • StringCacheSettings
  • in this key create a new DWORD value with the name 
    • StringCacheGeneration
  • double click the key and add the value 38b (hex) (other values may work too, you could verify with a functional system)
  • reboot the PC

After this change the issues described should be solved.

Remark:

The key does not exist in Windows 7.